CONWAY, New Hampshire — A New England congressman from nearby the source of the ongoing meningitis outbreak dismissed calls for more regulation on the industry at a debate Thursday.

Freshman Rep. Frank Guinta (R-NH) was asked during a forum in northern New Hampshire whether the meningitis outbreaks demonstrates that the pharmaceutical industry actually needs more regulation to prevent similar problems in the future. “If your question is do you need more regulation, I don’t think you need more,” Guinta said.

MODERATOR: Number two, when you look at the kind of disastrous results that come from the pharmaceutical industry’s compounding organization that created this meningitis problem across America, and those are very unregulated operations, doesn’t America actually need more regulation to protect us from bad actors, as you pointed out?

GUINTA: If your question is do you need more regulation, I don’t think you need more. What you need is the existing regulatory agencies to actually do their jobs properly. We know what the basic rules are, what the basic laws are. They need to be utilized in such a way where the bad actors are identified.

Watch it:

As of publication time, 23 people have died from the outbreak and 14,000 Americans were exposed to tainted steroid injections from a pharmaceutical company in Framingham, Massachusetts, less than 50 miles from Guinta’s district.

Despite the freshman congressman’s opposition, this meningitis episode highlights the need for stronger FDA regulations to prevent a repeat in the future. Because of the particular nature by which the steroid injections were created — a practice called compounding — the FDA lacks authority to oversee the process and ensure safety. Democratic lawmakers are pushing to strengthen the FDA’s oversight capacity, but congressmen like Guinta are signalling that such efforts could be blocked.

Still, Guinta is not entirely alone in his refusal to call for new regulations on the pharmaceutical industry. Earlier this month, Fox News said the outbreak actually demonstrates the need for less government regulation.

The defining problem of the United States federal budget is that the cost of health care is growing much faster than prices in the overall economy. The result is that Medicare and, to a lesser extent, Medicaid — the two programs dedicated to providing their enrollees with health coverage — become more expensive each year even when the benefit packages they provide remain the same. Buying the same amount of health care is costing the two programs ever more money, and that cost is rising faster than the increased tax revenue the government receives each year due to economic growth.

Today, the Incidental Economist flagged a remarkable set of graphs from Robert Dittmars at McSweeney’s that attempt to identify just how much this specific problem has contributed to the country’s deficit spending. Dittmars calculated what annual deficits (the blue line) and the national debt (the green line) would look like without health care costs factored in. When the lines go above zero the nation is running a surplus, and when they go below zero we’re adding to the debt:

A few points emerge from this graph concerning what our budget situation would have looked like if it weren’t for the rising trend in health care costs:

The debt was largely been created under Reagan and solved under Clinton. Prior to 1980, annual budgets were balanced and the debt level was stable. Deficits and the debt then began to significantly increase, until we swung up into massive budget surpluses in the mid 1990s. In fact, the Clinton-era correction was overkill — the green line of cumulative debt goes well above zero. But since there’s no such thing as “positive” debt, that would’ve just meant more revenue left over for other programs to invest in the country’s needs.

Obama would’ve started from a much better budget position. While our deficits since the recession have been entirely necessary in order to support the struggling economy, their size has been alarming. But if it hadn’t been for health care costs, Obama’s deficits would’ve been smaller by several hunted billion dollars. He also would’ve started with a debt level essentially at zero, rather than being forced to add his deficits to an already sizeable debt problem.

We wouldn’t have unsustainable government spending. Under Dittmar’s calculations, debt increases were only a problem when the twin GOP goals of tax cuts and military spending got out of hand. And they were easily reigned in by subsequent budget corrections. Which means that outside of health care programs, government is not growing at an unsustainable rate. You would never know this from the budgets of Mitt Romney or the House Republicans, which both slash non-defense and non-Medicare spending to astonishing degrees.

Now, in some sense differentiating between Medicare’s payroll taxes and other revenue streams is arbitrary. At the end of the day, a certain amount of revenue comes into the government from all taxes, and a certain amount goes out in spending programs. What Dittmar’s calculation does clarify is that when Medicare and Medicaid were created, lawmakers assumed a certain amount of revenue would be necessary to fund them. Since then, the actual cost of these programs has diverged to an ever greater degree from that assumption — not because of any failure of discipline or frugality on the government’s part, but simply because of how the health care economy evolved.

Despite the hard line position that many GOP politicians are taking on contraception — just yesterday, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) refused to say whether he believes contraception should be sold legally in the U.S. — a new poll finds wide margins of support for increasing women’s access to affordable birth control as a method of reducing unplanned pregnancies. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy reports that the results from their poll cut across party lines, particularly when women’s access to birth control is framed as a matter of economic importance or personal responsibility.

A full 70 percent of respondents reported that they believe insurance companies should cover the full cost of birth control as essential preventative care, just as Obamacare requires them to do under the health reform law’s contraception provision. And broad majorities of the survey participants — 91 percent of Democrats, 80 percent of Independents, and 66 percent of Republicans — believe the government should continue to help women access the birth control they need if they cannot afford contraceptive services, a position that one in three American women have been in at some point in their lives:

“Removing cost as a barrier and helping women choose from the full range of contraceptives available, including the most effective ones, leads to dramatic declines in unplanned pregnancy and abortions,” Sarah Brown, the CEO of the National Campaign, said a press release to announce her organization’s poll results. “The magic combination of responsible public and private policies and responsible behavior on the part of men and women can make all the difference in helping reduce unplanned pregnancy and improving the education and employment prospects of women and their families.”

Indeed, women who currently use contraception report that birth control helps them achieve economic autonomy for themselves, particularly when having a child would not allow them to finish school, keep a job, or financially support their family on their own. And respondents were nearly unanimous in their agreement that taking birth control is a sign of personal responsibility among the women who could not afford to support a child if they were to become pregnant.

Although Romney surrogates have brushed off birth control as merely a “peripheral issue,” at least one in three women report that birth control policy will play a large factor in determining their vote this November. President Obama currently has more than a 20 point lead on his birth control policy, which is largely predicated on the popular Obamacare provision that expands access to affordable contraception.

‘Twas The Night Before Christmas has been a Christmas staple since it was first published in the early 1820s. But despite the classic story’s timeless appeal, its main character, jolly St. Nick, is also susceptible to some of the 19th century’s less savory habits — including taking regular puffs from a large tobacco pipe throughout the course of the poem.

As the Los Angeles Times reports, Pamela McColl, a Canadian publisher and anti-smoking advocate, decided that it was time to bring Santa’s behavior more in line with 21st-century public health norms. So with the help of publishers Grafton and Scratch, she set out to release a version of the work that leaves out illustrated depictions of Santa’s bad habit, and includes a note from Mr. Claus himself saying that he has left that “old, tired business of smoking well behind us”:

“I just really don’t think Santa should be smoking in the 21st century,” McColl said by telephone…”I grew up in the ’60s, in the ‘Mad Men’ series,” said McColl, herself a former smoker. And when she looked at her childhood edition of the Christmas Eve story, she found Santa smoking on half of the pages.

“A lot of people my age have lost someone to smoking,” McColl said. “And I thought, ‘Oh my. This is a great project.’” [...]

The reaction, McColl said, has been mixed: support from children’s advocates and pediatricians but strong criticism from librarians and those who oppose censorship.

Some depictions of tobacco in the media still specifically target children, although public health advocates are working to change that. McColl’s quest to make Santa into a public health role model for children is a fairly cost-free way to communicate the harms of smoking to a younger generation. But when states do choose to spend money to invest in anti-smoking initiatives, such as California and Washington, they see a considerable return on their investment — by some estimates, as high as $50 saved in preventable future health costs for every dollar spent on anti-tobacco programming.

Despite intensified anti-smoking campaigns over the past decade, the overall global smoking rate actually remains quite high, while investments in anti-smoking initiatives are relatively low. In the United States, cigarette smoking rates have dropped while purchases of cheaper tobacco products has surged.

A federal judge has blocked Arizona from implementing HB 2800, a measure that would have revoked Medicaid funding for family planning services at any health organization that also provides abortions, effectively defunding the state’s Planned Parenthood affiliates. The ruling represents a victory for Planned Parenthood, who sued to prevent HB 2800 from going into effect after Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) signed the bill into law in May.

Judge Neil Wake rejected the argument that Arizona can cut off federal funding for family planning simply based on the state’s own determination that abortion providers aren’t qualified for Medicaid eligibility, pointing out that Medicaid recipients have the right to choose between the full range of qualified providers “without government interference.” Planned Parenthood officials told Reuters that they are pleased the judge’s decision will preserve health services for thousands of low-income women in Arizona:

Bryan Howard, the president of Planned Parenthood Arizona, called the ruling “a victory for poor women” in the state. With the ruling, their health care will not be interrupted while the case moves forward, he said.

“Today’s ruling affirms what we have said all along: no woman should ever have to fear being cut off from her doctor’s care because of shortsighted political games,” Howard said in a statement.

Under HB 2800, an estimated 3,000 Medicaid recipients in Arizona who currently receive contraception and other preventative care at their local Planned Parenthood clinic would no longer be eligible for services there. Planned Parenthood officials condemn these type of measures — which Republican-controlled legislatures in Texas and Oklahoma have also pushed through — as politicized attacks on the organization in the ongoing War on Women, especially since abortion services account for just 3 percent of the patient care provided by Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide.

This doesn’t represent the only politicized battle over Planned Parenthood in Arizona, however. Anti-abortion groups are also opposing a proposed sales tax in the state because they worry that some of the funds will go to Planned Parenthood.