Despite the fact that a similar bill failed in the GOP-dominated House of Representatives, a Virginia state lawmaker said he will propose a bill to ban sex-selection abortions in his state.

State Del. Bob Marshall (R) claimed that his measure is unrelated to the national ban that didn’t make it through Congress. “I don’t want us to become a haven for sex-selective abortion,” Marshall said. “It gets people to thinking that there’s a human being there that we’re not protecting.” But the problem is that Marshall is trying to push a bill to address a non-existent issue. Similar to the ban on sex-selection abortions that Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) tried to push, the Virginia bill would do only add additional, unnecessary barriers to abortion care.

And this new law would be on top of the restrictive abortion measures that Virginia already has in place, like the new law requiring women to have an ultrasound before they have an abortion. And just today, Virginia health commissioner Dr. Karen Remley resigned from her position on the state’s Board of Health today, citing Virginia’s restrictive regulations for abortion clinics as her primary reason for stepping down.

CONWAY, New Hampshire — Finding bipartisan agreement on any policy is a rarity these days, but lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have supported treating people who show up in the hospital, regardless of their ability to pay. Now, one Tea Party congressman is taking issue with that requirement.

Giving literal meaning to his state’s “Live Free Or Die” motto, Rep. Frank Guinta (R-NH) was asked at a debate Thursday about a hypothetical 25-year-old who needs treatment in the emergency room but doesn’t have health insurance. Guinta’s said he opposed the requirement that hospitals should have to treat people who come in without insurance. “If you are 25 years old and you are choosing not to purchase insurance with the expectation of trying to get it free from the ER at Memorial,” Guinta said, “that shouldn’t be the case”:

MODERATOR: I’m 25 years old. There’s no mandate for me to purchase insurance. The emergency room at Memorial Hospital by law must treat me when I walk in the door, whether I have any money, whether I have any intent to pay or not, I have to be treated. Isn’t it a good Republican principle to say everybody ought to pay for their own medical insurance if we’re going to require hospitals to treat them? [...]

GUINTA: If you guy purchase a good or service, you’re supposed to pay for it. Yes, if you are 25 years old and you are choosing not to purchase insurance with the expectation of trying to get it free from the ER at Memorial, that shouldn’t be the case. But for those people who are in a situation who truly can’t afford health insurance, those are the people that we really want to focus on and figure out how to provide them care.

Watch it (jump at 0:35 due to a brief malfunction with Guinta’s microphone):

The law mandating hospitals that receive Medicare funding to treat emergency room patients dates back to the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan signed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act.

The Affordable Care Act will help reduce the free rider problem Guinta describes by requiring everyone to purchase health insurance and providing subsidies to those who can’t afford it.

Virginia health commissioner Dr. Karen Remley resigned from her position on the state’s Board of Health today, citing Virginia’s restrictive regulations for abortion clinics as her primary reason for stepping down.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Remley believes she can no longer serve on the Board of Health “in good faith” because she does not agree with the new facility regulations, which require clinics to make costly, largely unnecessary updates that may force some of them to shut down:

In a letter to colleagues this afternoon, Remley writes that “how specific sections of the Virginia Code pertaining to the development and enforcement of these regulations have been and continue to be interpreted has created an environment in which my ability to fulfill my duties is compromised and in good faith I can no longer serve in my role.”

“I have submitted my resignation from the position from State Health Commissioner effective today.”

Last month, the state’s Board of Health voted to instate new restrictions for abortion clinics amid reports that State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli was essentially threatening the Board, warning that members could be denied state-funded legal services if they voted to relax the clinic regulations.

Women’s health advocates refer to the new laws as the “Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers” (TRAP) — an indirect method of restricting women’s access to legal abortions by over-regulating abortion providers, which is a tactic also used to target Planned Parenthood clinics across the country. In a statement regarding Remley’s resignation, the executive director of the advocacy group ProgressVA remarked, “It’s deplorable that the political machinations of Attorney General Cuccinelli and Governor McDonnell have compromised the ability of dedicated public servants like Commissioner Remley to promote the health of all Virginians. It’s never been more clear that these regulations are designed to limit access to safe and legal first trimester abortion in the Commonwealth.”

Former Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) appointed Remley to her position, and she stayed on to oversee the Virginia Department of Health when Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) took office.

There are significant geographic discrepancies among the drug stores that offer vaccines. In some parts of the country, you can get vaccinated for shingles or whooping cough in a local pharmacy like Walgreens, CVS, or Rite Aid — but that’s not true everywhere, even though those drug stores typically offer vaccines for influenza. And Slate points out that the inconsistencies are doing a disservice to Americans’ public health.

Some doctors worry that if Americans aren’t required to visit a physician’s office to receive their shots, they may neglect to visit the doctor for a regular check-up, or their medical records may be too difficult to effectively track. But as Slate notes, while tying vaccinations to doctor’s visits may help get some Americans get in the door, it can also dissuade many more from getting vaccinated at all:

In a perfect world, everyone would have a primary care doctor who offered long-term, holistic care. Yet some people don’t have health insurance (in case you hadn’t heard). And some just don’t go to the doctor unless they’re in dire need. “Ask any internist or family medicine doctor how many healthy men between the ages of 21 and 50 they generally see,” said Elizabeth Rosenblum, a family medicine doctor at UCSD. “There is theory and there is practice.” Not all doctors are keen on providing vaccines either, which require providers to make an upfront investment and then deal with storage, handling, and other logistical issues. Unlike pediatricians, who handle high vaccine volume, some adult doctors may decide that it just isn’t worth it. [...]

Pharmacists are already crucial to the annual flu shot push. During the swine flu surge in 2009, the CDC recommended the pandemic vaccine for everyone 6 months of age or older. The following year, for the first time, they also recommended the seasonal flu shot to the same broad range of people. This vastly boosted demand, and pharmacists were increasingly allowed to step in. In 2006-07 they administered roughly 7 percent of adult flu shots. By last year that number was over 18 percent. Carolyn Bridges, associate director for Adult Immunizations at the CDC, says she’s not sure the country could have kept up without the help of the pharmacists.

Although some proposed legislation has attempted to expand the scope of drug stores’ vaccination efforts, doctors’ groups have pushed back on them and ultimately killed the bills.

But since pharmacists are already so effective at ensuring that additional Americans get vaccinated for influenza, expanding access to vaccination in drug stores for other infectious diseases could help address other public health issues, such as the record-breaking whooping cough outbreak on the West Coast. Tighter vaccination requirements in Washington state may help suppress the outbreak from spreading even further, but expanding resources in drug stores could particularly impact low-income and uninsured Americans.

A Republican senate candidate said he would vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but encourage states to maintain its most important — and popular — provisions.

Rep. Rick Berg (R-ND), who is running for a seat being vacated by outgoing Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), tried to have it both ways in a debate with challenger Heide Heitkamp on Monday, arguing that the whole health law should be eliminated and that new legislation protecting consumers be put in its place. He bragged that his replacement bills would run only 10 pages:

BERG: I agree with the Frontier Amendment [increasing Medicare reimbursements to rural states], we need to deal with that. Pre-existing conditions, I think that should be done at the state level. The doughnut hole and covering kids till they’re 26. But you know what, Obamacare is 2,700 pages long. You know what those 5 things are? They are 10 pages long.

Watch it:

States have struggled to increase access to insurance and lower costs and are often unable to eliminate insurer discrimination against people with pre-existing condition without an accompanying individual mandate. And while Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts, which enjoyed high insurance rates before reform, successfully implemented a universal coverage plan, its changes were largely financed by the federal government and included a robust coverage requirement that Republicans now see as an infringement on personal liberty.

Ultimately, uninsurance rates vary and states with the most number of uninsured also have the least resources and smallest tax base from which to fund coverage expansions or provide subsidies to their populations. Balanced budget requirements also prevent many states from making meaningful long-term investments in reform and powerful health care industry lobbyists often stand in the way of reforms that could reduce industry profits.

But Berg seems more interested in keeping health legislation short than ensuring that it helps people find affordable coverage.

Despite the fact that long-acting forms of contraception — such as the intrauterine device (IUD), the patch, and the ring — are more effective methods of birth control than the pill, the vast majority of women in the U.S. are not using them. However, federal data released today shows that those long-acting contraceptive methods are gaining ground among women in the country, while condom use as the sole form of birth control is on the decline.

The National Center for Health Statistics surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 12,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44 about their birth control methods between 2006 and 2010, and compared those findings to a similar sample of over 10,000 women in 1995. While women’s use of sterilization and the daily birth control pill remained constant — each around 27 percent for both decades — the use of longer-acting hormonal methods like the patch and the ring increased 75 percent, and IUD use jumped by an impressive 600 percent.

The number of women who choose longer-acting birth control methods over the pill are still relatively small. Seven percent of respondents between 2006-10 reported using the patch or the pill, up from 4 percent in 1995, and IUD users rose from just 0.8 percent to 5.6 percent in the same time period. Still, as USA Today reports, the increases are encouraging:

“There is some shift toward more effective contraception. The shift is also toward methods that require less user intervention,” says Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research at the New York City non-profit Guttmacher Institute, which studies sexual and reproductive health.

Finer is lead author of research published this month in the journal Fertility and Sterility, which focused on long-acting contraception. The study found the proportion of women using such methods “increased significantly” since 2002 and occurred among women in almost every age, race, education and income group.

The study’s author notes that some women still see insurance coverage and cost as barriers to more effective forms of contraception, since co-pays for contraceptives like IUDs have traditionally not been covered under most insurance plans and can cost up to a thousand dollars out of pocket. Fortunately, the health care reform law will help ease some of this burden, since Obamacare’s birth control provision will require employer-based insurance plans to cover all types of birth control without a co-pay.

The new findings build on earlier research from the Guttmacher Institute, which has also found that IUD use is increasing among U.S. women. According to Guttmacher, removing the cost barriers to birth control helps to significantly increase the number of women who choose to use the most effective methods.