Although so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs) often present themselves as valid alternatives to women’s health clinics, they actually serve as a tool for anti-abortion advocates to talk women out of getting abortions, often using misleading information and conservative propaganda to shame women into making a different choice for their bodies. In San Francisco, however, a judge has confirmed that crisis pregnancy centers will no longer be able to use deceptive advertising to take advantage of vulnerable pregnant women.

After San Francisco city officials proposed an ordinance to crack down on CPCs’ false advertising — for example, signs telling women who are seeking abortions that they can receive counseling, medical care, and emotional support at a crisis pregnancy center — a local CPC sued. The anti-abortion organization First Resort alleged their civil rights were in danger of being violated by the overly vague law, which they claimed might be applied more broadly to restrict more than just their advertisements. Jezebel reports that this week, Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong dismissed the legal challenge to the city’s ordinance, ruling that First Resort should understand exactly what the law is intending to do:

First Resort claimed that statements regulated by the ordinance are not expressly limited to advertising and therefore the ordinance could apply “to virtually any speech made by First Resort, including statements made to its financial supporters for fundraising purposes.”

Armstrong noted that First Resort “ignored” provisions that state the purpose of the ordinance is to prevent false and misleading advertising regarding services and counseling provided or not provided and that any center cited under the ordinance would get a chance to cure the “false, misleading or deceptive advertising.”

The judge ruled that a “person of common intelligence could discern that the conduct proscribed by the ordinance is false and misleading advertising, and not simply any statement made by the limited services pregnancy center.”

San Francisco is not the first city to attempt to prevent CPCs from spreading misinformation, but it is the first to succeed. Laws attempting to regulate CPCs have been struck down in other cities like Baltimore and New York City. And in many parts of the country, crisis pregnancy centers have powerful allies in elected officials. Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) has said he hopes to defund Planned Parenthood clinics in his state and replace them with crisis pregnancy centers that don’t provide the same health services.

During Wednesday night’s presidential debate, Mitt Romney tried his very best to convince American seniors and future beneficiaries that his Medicare reform plan would not fundamentally alter the longstanding safety-net program’s structure. The Republican nominee painted his plan as a well-meaning experiment meant to inject some much-needed marketplace capitalism into the Medicare system, theoretically lowering the program’s cost and offering flexible, quality coverage options to future Americans, all while maintaining the benefits of traditional Medicare.

But Romney consistently obfuscated the details of his plan, which would actually result in massive cost-shifting onto consumers and fundamentally weaken the traditional Medicare entitlement. Here is what Romney said about Medicare Wednesday night:

…Number two is for people coming along that are young. What I’d do to make sure that we can keep Medicare in place for them is to allow them either to choose the current Medicare program or a private plan — their choice.They get to — and they’ll have at least two plans that will be entirely at no cost to them. So they don’t have to pay additional money, no additional $6,000. That’s not going to happen.

Setting aside the fact that Romney’s own stated desire to repeal Obamacare would raise the price of prescription drugs, preventative care, and Medicare Advantage premiums on current as well as future beneficiaries, Romney’s statements underplay just how radically his proposal — and the plan laid out by running mate Paul Ryan — would change Medicare for beneficiaries in 2023 and beyond.

From his comments during the debate, you would think that his plan is a simple alteration in Medicare’s funding mechanism, or an expansion of the kinds of private coverage plans available under Medicare Advantage. But that’s just not true. The Romney/Ryan plan would take Medicare, which is a “defined benefit” program, and turn it into a “defined contribution” program.

Basically, instead of the federal government guaranteeing that beneficiaries receive a host of defined services — as it does now — the federal government would instead set a hard budget for Medicare and then toss a chunk of cash at beneficiaries and let them choose from a host of private plans or traditional fee-for-service Medicare to get coverage. This means that if the calculated “premium support” subsidies for insurance and benchmark plans under the Romney/Ryan proposal do not cover all of a beneficiary’s needs, consumers would be forced to pay the difference out of pocket to get a plan that does. As health care costs rise, that will shift more and more financial burden onto consumers while their federal subsidies grow at a rate that simply can’t keep up with medical inflation.

As this Center for American Progress Action Fund study demonstrates, Romney/Ryan’s proposed voucher system would also weaken the traditional Medicare program, raising premiums as seniors spill over into private plans intentionally designed to attract healthier populations by providing cheaper benefits like preventative care, while leaving out more expensive benefits for the elderly such as long-term or intensive medical care. The existing Medicare pool, which would be left with a sicker population that needs Medicare’s expansive benefits, would consequently have much higher medical costs and rising premiums.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Attorney General Eric Holder announced Thursday that the Medicare Fraud Strike Force has arrested 91 people for a variety of Medicare billing fraud schemes across seven U.S. cities. The alleged fraud is massive in both scope and breadth, totaling over $230 million in home care billing fraud and $100 million in mental health billing fraud and involving health professionals including doctors, nurses, and various other care providers:

“Today’s enforcement actions reveal an alarming and unacceptable trend of individuals attempting to exploit federal health care programs to steal billions in taxpayer dollars for personal gain,” said Attorney General Holder. “Such activities not only siphon precious taxpayer resources, drive up health care costs, and jeopardize the strength of the Medicare program — they also disproportionately victimize the most vulnerable members of society, including elderly, disabled and impoverished Americans.”

“Today’s arrests put criminals on notice that we are cracking down hard on people who want to steal from Medicare,” said HHS Secretary Sebelius. “The health care law gives us new tools to better fight fraud and make Medicare stronger. In addition to the arrests made today, HHS used new authority from the health care law to stop future payments to many of the health care providers suspected of fraud, saving Medicare resources and taxpayer dollars from being lost to fraud in the first place.”

The Obama Administration has taken Medicare billing fraud very seriously, setting up consumer-driven watchdog groups, issuing strict warnings to providers about gaming Medicare for personal gain, and enforcing strong fraud-prevention measures in Obamacare, all in an effort to curb unsavory (and illegal) practices such as “upcoding” that have the potential to devastate the medically needy by looting the safety-net program’s funds and driving up costs. The recent arrests go to show that the Administration has the bite to go with its bark.

“This is the result of coordinated anti-fraud efforts – including Medicare flagging suspicious activity, efforts between agencies to investigate this criminal activity, and today’s actions by law enforcement and HHS,” said CMS Deputy Administrator for Program Integrity Peter Budetti. “As we stop payments to these providers suspected of fraud, we continue our efforts to move from a pay-and-chase model to one where we stop fraudsters before they can successfully bill Medicare and Medicaid.”

A new lawsuit over harmful levels of the coolant polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs) in Massachusetts school buildings is forcing biotech firm Monsanto Company to revisit its unsavory past. Before Monsanto became the agricultural giant it is today, the company’s major product used to be PCBs, which it routinely dumped in rivers and open pits while deliberately attempting to hide the damage. The company managed to survive the many lawsuits from poisoned communities and distance itself from its toxic past — largely thanks to the help of Mitt Romney.

But now the town of Lexington is trying to hold the company accountable for the PCBs used in school construction between 1950 and 1976, when PCBs were banned by Congress. The lawsuit, which seeks to represent all Massachusetts schools, claims Monsanto should have warned manufacturers of the health and environmental dangers posed by exposure to PCBs. The chemical has been definitively linked to cancer and serious neurological and hormonal disorders.

Monsanto’s corporate affairs director fired back that the company is not responsible for the outdated building: “It is our understanding that the school in question was built over 50 years ago, was poorly maintained, and was scheduled for demolition years ago since it had outlived its useful life.”

Many of the schools in Massachusetts have also “outlived” themselves, partly due to the same man who helped Monsanto outlive its disastrous PCB scandal. As governor, Romney slashed state funds for local aid in 2003 and 2004, forcing towns to cut corners and enact freezes on education spending. As almost half of all municipal revenue goes toward education, Romney’s austerity budgets dealt a serious blow to local schools.

Later, Romney took credit for then Treasurer Tim Cahill’s plan to refinance school building assistance, which was meant to clear the more than 400 pending school construction projects in the state. Soon after the refinancing plan was passed, however, Romney froze state contributions to local school construction projects, leaving cities and towns to scramble for funds and suspend some of their backlogged projects.

Lexington’s lawsuit states that more than half of the state’s 1,900 schools were built between 1950 and the 1970s, making them likely to contain harmfully elevated levels of PCBs.

A new study focusing on low-income women in St. Louis, MO concludes that expanding access to free contraception — just as the health care reform law does through its provision to provide birth control without a co-pay — leads to significantly lower rates of unintended teen pregnancy and abortion. Researchers found that when women weren’t prohibited by cost, they chose more effective, long-lasting forms of birth control and experienced many fewer unintended pregnancies as a result.

Researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis worked in partnership with the local Planned Parenthood affiliate to track over 9,200 low-income women in the St. Louis area, some of whom lacked insurance coverage, during a four-year Contraceptive CHOICE study. The CHOICE project simulated Obamacare’s birth control provision by allowing teens and women to select from the full range of FDA-approved contraceptive options and receive their preferred method at no cost. They found that birth rates among the teens who received free birth control in the CHOICE project were less than a fifth of the national teen birth rate — just 6.3 births per 1,000 teens, compared to 34.3 per 1,000 teens nationwide in 2010 — and abortion rates were less than half of both the regional and national rates.

And researchers are confident that these positive findings could extend to the rest of the nation, estimating that the national simulation of their CHOICE program could prevent one abortion for every 79 to 137 women given a choice between free birth control options. “As a society, we want to reduce unintended pregnancies and abortion rates. This study has demonstrated that having access to no-cost contraception helps us get to that goal,” Alina Salganicoff, director of women’s health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told the Associated Press.
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