After visiting Colorado Springs, one of the towns most devastated by ongoing wildfires, President Obama instructed officials to offer federal health insurance to seasonal firefighters, the Denver Post reports.

Hundreds of seasonal firefighters—a force comprised mostly of young people and college students—have been battling especially severe wildfires in Colorado and other Western states, risking both immediate danger and long-term health consequences from bronchitis to lung cancer. Obama reportedly told his cabinet upon his return that he wanted to “find a solution” for these firefighters, who are not eligible for federal insurance because they are not full-time workers. Earlier this summer, an online petition garnering 126,000 signatures helped promote the cause to insure firefighters and another Denver Post article highlighted the need:

Tales of temporary firefighters or their families suffering from expensive ailments or putting off care are “a dime a dozen,” Lauer said from southeastern Wyoming, on the Russells Camp fire. Lauer is in his sixth temporary season and will soon start University of Denver law school classes but said he worries more about other families.
“The issue really hit home when my godson was born prematurely and his folks got stuck with a huge hospital bill,” Lauer said.

That family, Nate Ochs and Constance Van Kley in South Dakota, now has insurance through Ochs’ permanent job. But more than half the Tatanka crew is temporary, without federal insurance, Van Kley said. ”A lot of them are in that phase of beginning to sort out a career and family,” she said. “Being uninsured is stressful even when you’re 19.”

It is not yet clear how many people will now be covered or for how long, as most of these workers will find new jobs by winter. Mark Davis, president of the Forest Service Council of the union, estimated for the Associated Press that the federal government would pay $17.5 million a year to pay its share of premiums for seasonal firefighters working for the Forest Service, which employs about 70 percent of federal firefighters. The Office of Personnel Management will release the directive to provide access to the firefighters by the end of the month and Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) has also introduced legislation meant to provide health insurance for firefighters and their families.

In the past, these workers would either forgo health insurance entirely or purchase an individual policy made more expensive by their high-risk jobs. Under Obamacare, by 2014, all uninsured Americans will be able to find coverage in the state exchanges.

Catholic leaders are fighting against a new Obamacare policy requiring insurers and businesses to offer contraception coverage to women, even after the White House announced a compromise to protect religious institutions. Under the measure, a religiously affiliated organization like a Catholic college or hospital does not have to pay for contraception coverage if it objects to offering birth control, but its employees will still have access to birth control.

As President Obama put it during an an interview with a New Orleans TV reporter on Monday, while religious liberty is “critical,” it’s “not fair” for these institutions to deny coverage to non-Catholic employees:

REPORTER: He describes himself as a Catholic voter and wrote ‘What can you say about a healthcare bill that’ll mandate insurance companies to provide birth control, sterilization, etc. to employees of Catholic universities, hospitals and churches since this goes against the Catholic religion?’ We know there is compromising language in place. Some say it doesn’t go far enough and that the real, the much bigger issue is religious liberty, not contraception.

OBAMA: Yeah. Well it’s absolutely true that religious liberty is critical. I mean that’s what our country was founded on. That’s the reason why we exempted churches, we exempted religious institutions, but we did say that big Catholic hospitals or universities who employ a lot of non-Catholics and who receive a lot of federal money, that for them to be in a position to say to a woman who works there you can’t get that from your insurance company even though the institution isn’t paying for it, that that crosses the line where that woman, she suddenly is gonna have to bear the burden and the cost of that. And that’s not fair.

Despite claims that the contraception policy tramples religious liberty and is an “unprecedented attack,” many large Catholic institutions provided contraception coverage even before they were required to do so. For example, Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and DePaul University in Illinois offer employees the option of receiving contraception, joining other Catholic organizations across the country.

Many religious organizations even agree with Obama’s reasoning. After Wisconsin implemented a contraception equity clause in 2010, the Diocese of Madison indicated that it would comply with the state law, noting that while employees would be given “strong pastoral recommendations against” using the contraception benefit, employees should “use their conscience and do the right thing.”

On Monday evening, Rep. David Dreier (R-CA) said that insurance companies should be allowed to discriminate against people with brain tumors during a House Rules Committee debate of the GOP’s bill repealing the Affordable Care Act. The law, which Republicans will vote to eliminate on Wednesday, includes a provision prohibiting insurance companies from turning away sick people.

But Dreier suggested that these individuals would be better off enrolling in state-based “high-risk insurance pools,” that could offer coverage to the individuals who are turned away from the individual health care market because they are too costly to cover:

DREIER: And I believe my state of California has a structure in place to deal with pre-existing conditions. It’s a pooling process, which I think is one worthy of consideration, because while I don’t that think someone who is diagnosed with a massive tumor should the next day be able to have millions and millions and millions of dollars in health care provided, I do believe that there can be a structure to deal with the issue of pre-existing conditions.

Watch it:

The Affordable Care Act already includes a high-risk pool program that acts as a bridge to 2014, when the new regulations prohibiting discrimination go into effect. 67,482 individuals have already benefited from the program, although the high cost of insuring sick people means that it is not sustainable over the long-run.

The California pool that Drier trumpets, for instance, has had a hard time attracting enrollees. A 2008 LA Times article described the California program — which existed prior to the ACA — as “unaffordable, unavailable or ineffective for many of those who most need health insurance.”

The lives of more than 100,000 women worldwide could be saved by increased access to contraception, according to a new study on maternal deaths funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The study, conducted by The Lancet, surveyed 172 countries and found that maternal deaths would decrease by about one-third if contraceptives were more easily accessible. What’s more, already available contraception prevented 44 percent of potential maternal deaths in 2008:

We estimate, using model I, that 342,203 women died of maternal causes in 2008, but that contraceptive use averted 272,040 (uncertainty interval 127 937—407 134) maternal deaths (44% reduction), so without contraceptive use, the number of maternal deaths would have been 1·8 times higher than the 2008 total. Satisfying unmet need for contraception could prevent another 104,000 maternal deaths per year (29% reduction).

The British government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will host a conference in England this weekend to discuss funding for greater contraception access, particularly in developing countries.

The global movement toward contraception access to improve women’s health is oddly reversed from the contraception battles here in the United States. While countries worldwide are recognizing how contraceptive access is important to saving the life and livelihood of mothers, some American Republican politicians are trying to find any foothold to roll back contraception and abortion access.