A federal judge ruled Monday night that the Hobby Lobby craft store chain must offer its 13,000 employees contraceptive coverage without a co-pay, as mandated by Obamacare.

Hobby Lobby sued to deny such coverage in September, citing conservative evangelical owner David Green’s personal religious objections to certain types of birth control that fall under Obamacare’s contraception mandate. In particular, the company sought to deny its employees coverage for the morning after pill, commonly known as Plan B.

But on Monday night, U.S. District Judge Joe Heaton denied the request in a 28-page ruling, pointing out that religious institutions have already been given exemptions from covering contraception, and that Hobby Lobby does not qualify since it is a private business:

“However, Hobby Lobby and Mardel [its partner company] are not religious organizations,” the ruling states. “Plaintiffs have not cited, and the court has not found, any case concluding that secular, for-profit corporations such as Hobby Lobby and Mardel have a constitutional right to the free exercise of religion.”

Hobby Lobby’s attorney said the companies’ owners, the Green family, plan to appeal.

“Every American, including family business owners like the Greens, should be free to live and do business according to their religious beliefs,” Kyle Duncan, general counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said in a statement.

Just last week, a different federal judge issued an injunction over the contraception mandate in Obamacare, siding with religious employers of a private company. But Judge Heaton’s assessment of the law is correct: While non-profit religious institutions are already exempt from the mandate, private businesses do not have the same exemption.

Last week, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a report titled “The Senior Protection Plan” that outlined serious ways to cut U.S. health care spending without shifting the burden onto sick, poor, and elderly Americans. This past weekend, a misleading editorial in the Minot Daily News falsely claimed that such a proposal would lower seniors’ care quality and raid the Medicare entitlement.

But the claims about the Senior Protection Plan’s allegedly negative effect on seniors’ health coverage don’t consider the fact that many conservative Medicare “reform” plans would actually cripple the safety-net program by turning it into a voucher system and shifting costs squarely onto seniors’ premiums. Here’s what the Minot Daily News got wrong about the Senior Protection Plan:

1) “President Barack Obama’s health care law will slash $716 billion in funding for the Medicare program.” This was one of the 2012 presidential campaign’s most repeated lies, but it was untrue then, and it is untrue now. Obamacare does not “cut” Medicare funding — in fact, it slows the growth of Medicare spending by eliminating wasteful overpayments to private insurers, incentivizing better performance by providers, and cracking down on fraud and abuse in the Medicare system. These reductions will actually result in Medicare being solvent for an additional eight years, as well as more affordable care for seniors.

2) “[Obamacare] and the federal-state Medicaid system were not targeted by the CAP for cuts to help lessen the seemingly ever-expanding United States spending deficit.” The CAP plan specifically calls for $10 billion in savings from Medicaid. But unlike conservative proposals to throttle federal spending on the program and throw millions of low-income Americans off their insurance rolls, the Senior Protection Plan encourages savings by making sure that Medicaid does not have to overpay relative to third-party insurers and decreasing future payments to safety-net hospitals that will become unnecessary as more states implement Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. CAP also does not score multiple proposals in its plan — such as better care coordination and case management between Medicare and Medicaid, bundled payments, and competitive bidding — that have the potential to further reduce medical spending while simultaneously improving care quality.

3) “The CAP insists the only Medicare cuts would be in reimbursements to health care providers. Give us a break. That would lessen the quality of care for senior citizens. And the CAP plan calls for very real cuts in funding for Medicare beneficiaries, too.” The Senior Protection Plan is centered precisely on the belief that American seniors should not have to sacrifice their benefits in exchange for nominally reducing the deficit. This is in stark contrast to conservative proposals that aim to voucherize Medicare, transforming it from a “defined benefit” program into a “defined contribution” program without actually stemming the long-term upward trend in health care spending. Much of CAP’s proposed $385 billion in savings result from requiring drug companies to pay higher rebates for medications prescribed to “dual eligible” seniors who are on both Medicare and Medicaid. Furthermore, its proposed reductions to providers are precisely that — reductions in historical overpayments for certain type of care facilities and services — and the plan may actually result in significantly higher savings by moving towards more consumer-friendly, efficient practices such as prospective bundled payments, pay-for-performance measures, competitive bidding, and fraud prevention.

All told, the Senior Protection Plan is a serious proposal to reduce national health spending by addressing the actual factors driving costs — overpayments to providers and pharmaceutical companies, a poorly-coordinated system of care management, and inefficient modes of care delivery — rather than balancing the budget on the backs of sick, elderly, and poor Americans without even addressing the concerning trajectory of U.S. health care costs. By transforming the health care payment and delivery structure to be more logical and efficient, CAP’s proposal would lead to genuine savings by actually improving the way American health care works — without pushing costs onto Americans.

Officials from the National Football League (NFL) announced on Monday that the organization will begin transitioning from the hand-written records it currently uses to keep track of players’s health to electronic medical records (EMRs) that will digitally record players’ injuries and general health histories.

The new system will be phased in over two seasons and eventually implemented across all 32 professional football teams. While the NFL’s shift to EMRs won’t make football safer in and of itself, it will help ensure that team medics and private physicians can more easily share players’ medical histories, as well as allow doctors to monitor sensitive head injuries in real time:

Records will be able to move with a player, should they be traded to another team, and are touch and speech-capable. Girish Kumar Navani, the CEO and co-founder of eClinicalWorks, says the implementation of EMRs creates a much more fluid system of care coordination.

“We are making the scope of this medical data digital. Which means the pharmacy will be connected electronically, as well as the labs and the diagnostic medical imaging centers.” All this, Navani says, will be shareable with the team as well as other medical staff.

Incorporating video streaming is a new feature for eClinicWorks, and Navani says that it will allow doctors will be able to see what exactly caused a player’s injury. Currently the NFL has an injury reporting system in which data is entered manually, but Navani says that the new EMRs will sync with the current technology of the league, including a web-based application about concussion injuries.

In recent years, football safety has come under increased scrutiny after mounting evidence that the numerous concussions and other brain-related injuries sustained during the sport can lead to serious health problems for former football players, including Alzheimer’s and Lou Gherig’s disease. In fact, studies suggest that retired NFL players are four times more likely than the general population to die of those brain diseases.

Obamacare requires hospitals and doctors’ offices to upgrade their systems to incorporate EMRs to make information-sharing among a patients’ various care providers complete, simple, and efficient. By getting a head start on upgrading its systems for football players, the NFL may just be poised to get a better handle on its ongoing physical injury problem through high-tech monitoring and consolidated patient records.

A second species of worm has evolved to withstand pesticides in genetically modified crops, the latest escalation of the natural arms race spurred on by GMOs. “Armyworms” — so called because their infestation of fields resembles a military onslaught — were able to eat DuPont-Dow corn containing a pesticide protein without adverse effects, according to a field trial conducted in Florida this year.

Rootworms in the Midwest have already developed resistance to a different GM corn produced by Monsanto Company. This latest breed of armyworms adds to the mounting evidence that insects are following the evolutionary path of “super weeds,” which are now immune to herbicides in GMO crops and present a serious problem for farmers.

Monsanto and DuPont marketed their products as a way to reduce toxic chemical use on plants. These new findings contradict that claim, as these superweeds and superworms force farmers to deploy even heavier doses of potent chemicals — as much as 527 million pounds of herbicides alone since 1996. Bloomberg reports:

“This is most likely field resistance,” Fangneng Huang, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, said at the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America. [...] Concern that the insecticides are failing is prompting farmers to apply more chemicals, unwinding the primary environmental benefit of pest-fighting crops, Michael Gray, an entomologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana, said in a Nov. 14 presentation at the conference.

Monsanto and DuPont led a multi-million dollar campaign against California’s GMO labeling proposition, helping to ensure its defeat earlier this month. California is the 21st state that has tried and failed to pass GMO labeling legislation within the past year.

Now that Florida’s Department of Corrections has auctioned off the job of providing state inmates with health services to the highest-bidding companies, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) is moving ahead with his controversial plan to privatize prisoners’ health care. Since Florida is now locked into a contract with Corizon Healthcare of Nashville, and plans to sign a second contract with Pittsburgh-based Wexford Health Sources, Gov. Scott’s administration has already begun to lay off nearly two thousand state workers whose jobs have now become obsolete.

As the Miami Herald reports, nearly 2,000 state workers are beginning to receive notices that their jobs are ending, as part of the nation’s biggest push to outsource prisoners’ health care to private companies:

“Due to the outsourcing of this function, your position will be deleted,” reads a dryly worded dismissal notice from the Department of Corrections, sent to 1,890 state employees in the past two weeks. [...]

In the dismissal letters, prison officials emphasize that dismissed workers will get first consideration for new jobs at one of the two for-profit vendors, though with fewer benefits. The workers also expect to pay more out of their pockets for their own health insurance.

Many make less than $35,000 a year, have not had a raise in six years and live in economically distressed areas home to many state prisons, including Bradford, Dixie, Levy, Suwannee and Union counties.

Labor unions representing the affected health workers are already gearing up to fight against the Scott administration’s decision to outsource health care. As AFSCME spokesman Doug Martin told the Miami Herald, unions believe that privatizing prison health care is “bad for employees who will lose retirement and health benefits and probably pay,” as well as a “rotten deal for taxpayers.”

Although lawmakers like Scott tout privatization as an effective cost-saving measure to offset expensive care in the state prison system, private prisons often don’t actually save states any money. In reality, investigations into privatized prisons have found that states shift responsibilities to outside companies purely to cut costs and skimp on prisoners’ health care, often leading to “inhumane” conditions that have sparked legal challenges. Inmates in Arizona sued the state after it failed to provide adequate health care in its privatized prison facilities — leading to cases where prisoners were denied proper medical treatment and, in some instances, suffered preventable deaths.

In fact, the Arizona Department of Corrections recently leveled a fine against Wexford Health Services — one of the very same private companies that Florida plans to hire — after discovering repeated cases of negligent care in the prisons that Wexford took over. But that hasn’t stopped Scott’s administration from firing Florida’s health care employees in favor of a future relationship with Wexford.

Despite the fact that voters across the country rejected radical anti-choice legislation in this month’s election, Ohio lawmakers have been busy reviving the War on Women during their lame duck session. Ohio’s Health And Aging Committee voted to strip funding from Planned Parenthood last week, Republican lawmakers introduced a misleading “sex-selective” abortion ban at the same committee meeting, and Ohio’s Senate may soon consider an extreme “heartbeat” bill that represents the most restrictive anti-choice legislation in the nation.

And Ohio lawmakers are so focused on their radical anti-choice agenda that they don’t have time for practical legislation that would actually help lower the abortion rate. The Dayton Daily News reports that the House’s health committee gave a “complimentary” hearing to HB 338, which seeks to establish science-based standards for comprehensive sexuality education in the state’s public schools, but has no intentions of advancing the legislation:

In the final weeks of two-year legislative session, Ohio lawmakers are sparring over several bills related to abortion and women’s health, leading to charges from Democrats that their Republican colleagues are engaging in a “war on women.” [...]

Meanwhile, a Democratic bill that is being touted as a comprehensive sexual health and education measure, had its first and probably last hearing this week.

[Rep. Lynn Wachtmann (R)] chairman of the House Health and Aging Committee, said he gave the bill a “complimentary hearing” on Wednesday, but it won’t go any further, at least not this year.

In fact, if Ohio lawmakers are so concerned about preventing abortions that they feel the need to target Planned Parenthood clinics, they might want to start with ensuring that students receive medically comprehensive information about human sexuality, the female reproductive system, and preventative measures like birth control and condoms. Equipping young adults with comprehensive sex education is directly related to helping prevent unintended pregnancies. The states that push abstinence-only education programs in their public schools — which often mislead students about birth control’s rate of effectiveness, and aren’t honest about the best ways to prevent sexually transmitted diseases — have the highest rates of teen pregnancies, while adolescents who actually receive instruction about prevention methods are 60 percent less likely to get someone else pregnant or get pregnant themselves.

A recent survey of the health classes in New York state’s public schools found that they have “shocking gaps” in their sex education programs, highlighting the need for standardized guidelines requiring up-to-date, scientifically accurate information across schools. Ohio’s school system could have the same kind of gaps — but, thanks to Ohio lawmaker’s insistence on prioritizing attacks on abortion access and Planned Parenthood funding, they won’t get addressed this year.