Retired generals and admirals of the advocacy group Mission: Readiness document the impact that the nation’s childhood obesity epidemic has on military service in a new report entitled “Still Too Fat to Fight.” Referring to junk food in school cafeterias as a “national security issue,” their study estimates that roughly 25 percent of all American adults are now disqualified from military service due to being overweight.

The study calls on U.S. officials to do their part to address poor health standards in school lunch programs in an attempt to curb childhood obesity rates:

Finding ways to reverse our epidemic of obesity is crucial because the U.S. Department of Defense alone spends an estimated $1 billion per year for medical care associated with weight-related health problems. In a dramatic move to address this problem, the military is bringing healthier foods to its schools, dining facilities, and vending machines, but it cannot win this fight alone. The civilian sector needs to do its part.

The 300 retired generals and admirals of Mission: Readiness are joining parents and nutritionists in strongly supporting new efforts to limit the sale of junk food in our schools. Removing the junk food from our schools should be part of nationwide comprehensive action that involves parents, schools and communities in helping students build stronger bodies with less excess fat. We need action to ensure that America’s child obesity crisis does not become a national security crisis.

Some Republican lawmakers stand in stark disagreement with the generals’ call to regulate nutrition standards in school lunches. Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), for one, does not believe that schools should provide lunch programs at all. Rep. Steve King (R-IA) — who has referred to efforts to cap calories in school lunches as “the nanny state personified” — claims that constituents have told him “kids are starving in school” and introduced the No Hungry Kids Act to remove the calorie limits on school lunches that are currently in place.

However, even with the current calorie limits, junk foods in school lunches already account for almost 400 billion calories — which, according to the generals’ study, would weigh more than the aircraft carrier Midway if converted to candy bars.

– Nate Niemann

Today is World Contraception Day, a global campaign to “enable young people to make informed decisions on sexual and reproductive health.” Every year, 100,000 women’s lives could be saved globally if access to contraception were expanded; unfortunately, more than 200 million women in the world do not have access to birth control.

Millions of women in the U.S. now have access to contraception at no additional cost to them thanks to the Obamacare provision that requires insurers to cover birth control as preventative health care, saving American women thousands of dollars a year. Despite broad public support for the Obamacare regulation, Republicans have consistently attacked it — even though nearly every single woman has used a form of birth control at some point in her life.

ThinkProgress has compiled just a few reasons that access to contraception impacts women, both in the U.S. and on a global scale:

Coinciding with World Contraception Day, world leaders struck a deal to lower the price of some forms of contraception globally, a move that will help expand access to birth control outside of the U.S. in the way that the Obamacare provision does for American women. Access to contraception is an economic issue for women, and these numbers highlight its importance.

Driven by the allure of profits and buoyed by an easily marketable emergency medical service, the number of American trauma centers has exploded by 200 additional facilities spread across 20 states in the last three years.

But according to a report by Kaiser Health News and USA Today, these facilities are an overall bad deal for consumers and a drag on the larger health care market. Despite their life-saving potential, trauma centers encourage harmful competition between health professionals and drive up the cost of medical care due to unavoidably high staffing, technological, and medical costs:

The highest-level centers (known as level 1 and level 2) have specially trained staff and surgeons either on call, or at the hospital 24 hours a day. [...] Lower-level trauma centers (known as level 3, 4 or 5), which account for most of the new centers, typically stabilize a patient and arrange for their transfer to a higher-level unit. [...]

When trauma centers operate too close to one another, they compete for specialists and have fewer patients to recoup high fixed expenses for staffing and technology, said Ellen MacKenzie, chairwoman of health policy at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who co-authored the New England Journal study.

That can end up costing consumers because hospitals bill insurers to cover their expenses, and insurers pass those on in the form of higher premiums, deductibles and co-pays.

The trend towards high concentrations of lower-level trauma centers presents a double-edged sword for consumers. Although stabilization and transfer facilities can save lives — particularly in rural and isolated regions — they still face exorbitant business costs, and the over-crowding effect not only drives up medical costs and premiums but also lowers the quality of patient care. “The more patients trauma surgeons take care of, the better they do in terms of treatment,” MacKenzie said. “But with too many trauma centers, you dilute that effect.”

Further complicating the matter is the reality that trauma center patients are typically victims of violent crime in inner-cities — the type of patients most likely to be poor or unemployed and least likely to have access to health insurance.

The most feasible method of mitigating the negative consequences of excess trauma facilities is better coordination between regional centers and hospitals that provide broader health services, though such a goal is difficult in the context of for-profit medical competition. Adding consumers to insurance rolls also holds promise for keeping down overall costs as well as providing patients with access to affordable care and post-treatment rehabilitative services. Medicaid already has a strong record of covering such services for consumers, and since many trauma center patients are poor or uninsured, Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion will prove an essential asset for victims of traumatic injuries.

City officials in New Orleans are taking matters into their own hands while Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) continues to resist implementing an Obamacare provision that would expand the Medicaid program in his state to cover additional low-income Louisianans.

Despite the fact that about 20 percent of Louisiana residents lack health insurance — one of the highest rates of uninsurance in the nation, behind just Texas and Nevada — Jindal refuses to accept federal funds under Obamacare’s proposed Medicaid expansion to address this coverage gap. In an effort to provide low-income residents with affordable health coverage even without the federal expansion of the Medicaid program, officials in New Orleans are working to circumvent Jindal’s decision:

Jindal said the Affordable Care Act, including the Medicaid expansion, is too costly and he is one of nine GOP governors who declined to implement the Medicaid expansion. [...] But New Orleans officials said they are encouraged by a Medicaid waiver that has allowed the city to provide preventative care at no charge to uninsured low-income residents and at sliding scale, based on income, for others. That waiver expires in 2014, and the city hopes it will be able to continue to provide universal coverage through expansion of Medicaid envisioned by the health-care overhaul law, Health Commissioner Karen DeSalvo said.

“Should the governor not expand Medicaid as allowed through the Affordable Care Act, our administration is working with the (federal) Department of Health and Human Services on looking into some options to provide universal coverage for our residents,” DeSalvo said.

Louisiana Department of Health and Hospital Secretary Bruce Greenstein didn’t explicitly say that his agency would reject the proposed Medicaid expansion in New Orleans, but he did note that New Orleans officials wouldn’t be able to move forward without its approval. In a statement, he said that expanding the Medicaid program to extend coverage to Americans who currently struggle to afford the health insurance they need is a “bad idea and expensive for taxpayers.”

New Orleans isn’t the only city with frustrated officials working to provide health coverage for their low-income residents without their governor’s help. In Texas, the state with the unfortunate distinction of having its health system ranked the worst in the nation, several counties are exploring the possibility of setting up their own Medicaid expansions after Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) refused to do so.