Rick Santorum and his daughter Bella

On Tuesday afternoon, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) read a letter from former Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS) imploring Senate Republicans to ratify a United Nations treaty affirming equal rights for disabled individuals. Dole, who was hospitalized on Tuesday, was a World War II veteran who suffered lasting disabilities after his service.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced Monday that he plans to bring the treaty up for a vote in the Senate — but, despite widespread support for the measure, Republicans seem bent on killing it again this time around after blocking Democrats’ last attempt to ratify the treaty in August.

Former GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum is leading the charge against the treaty. Santorum, whose daughter was born with a rare genetic disorder, takes issue with protections that allow the state to separate a child from a parent if “such separation is necessary for the best interests of the child,” such as in cases of emotional or physical abuse. At a press conference with Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Santorum called this “a direct assault on us and our family.” He expanded on that point in an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan on Monday night:

It’s the convention for the Rights of People with Disabilities, which sounds like a wonderful thing. But the problem is there’s a provision in this international law which we would be adopting if the Senate ratifies this that puts the state, the state in the position of determining what is in the best interest of a disabled child. And as the — as the father of a little girl who, if you look up the medical definition of her condition, says it’s incompatible with life, I hesitate to think what those in government and in charge would think that — how our daughter should be treated and what medical treatment should be available to her if her diagnosis is — it’s incompatible with life.

And so this would be something unprecedented in American law to give the state the ultimate authority as to what is in the best interest of your child. Historically the United States has been clear. Parents, unless they’re unfit for some reason, get that decision. This would change under this convention, and that’s why Karen and I stood forward today and along with Mike Lee from Utah, and said we have to oppose this.

Watch it:

The treaty, which bans discrimination against people with disabilities, was originally signed in 2006 under George W. Bush’s administration and re-signed in 2009 by President Obama. More than 150 nations have signed it and 126 have already ratified it, and it is backed by a range of disabilities and veterans groups as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The specific article that Santorum is concerned about actually ensures that disabled children are not separated from parents against their will or on the basis of their disability or a parent’s disability. Only in cases where a judge determines a child is being abused or neglected would a separation be allowed. This is more or less identical to the U.S.’ current policy, which Santorum himself acknowledges.

In fact, as Dana Milbank points out, the treaty requires other nations to model their laws on the Americans With Disabilities Act, which already forbids discrimination based on disability.

The ADA ensures that Santorum’s daughter, Bella, cannot be blocked from going to school or from receiving the medical treatment and accommodations she needs. In opposing the treaty, Santorum is actually opposing those same protections for other disabled people all around the world.

Fox News might not need to invite Republican guests onto their programs any more; the hosts themselves seem to be doing a good enough job of reciting GOP policies live on air.

In the latest example, host Martha MacCallum on Tuesday quizzed Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) repeatedly on why his party wouldn’t raise the Medicare age, going so far as to disagree with surveys the Congressman cited and proposing to find other guests who might accept a different set of facts:

MACCALLUM: But you are reforming the Medicare system because it’s going to go bust in several years, so if you prolong the program and you make the age later — people are living longer, so isn’t that age sort of outmoded and isn’t that a good thing to address long-term?

VAN HOLLEN: There are a lot better ways of doing it. [...]

MACCALLUM: But what we’re seeing, though, is people are losing services because what’s happening is doctors are no longer taking Medicare patients. You need to find a different way to get at the problem because they are losing those services as a result of that anyway.

VAN HOLLEN: Actually, Martha, every survey that’s been taken shows that patient satisfaction in the Medicare program is much higher than patient satisfaction in the private health insurance market. That’s been the result of numerous surveys that have been done over the last couple of years.

MACCALLUM: I could introduce you to doctors who would say otherwise and say they are no longer taking Medicare patients as a result of all this.

Watch it:

In fact, Van Hollen is right about patient satisfaction with Medicare. Patients do attest to being more satisfied with the program than with private insurers. Increasing the eligibility age would only save Medicare money by shifting the cost burden onto older Americans who find themselves between the old eligibility age and the new, as well as onto employers and states. And the savings themselves are minuscule. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the change “would have little effect on the trajectory of Medicare’s long-term spending…because younger beneficiaries are healthier and thus less costly than the program’s average beneficiary.”

Seven-year-old Mykayla Comstock is one of 51 children under the age of 17 who are currently enrolled in Oregon’s medical marijuana program. After Mykayla was diagnosed with leukemia and began chemotherapy, her mother filed medical marijuana paperwork with the state so that she could help ease her daughter’s pain with capsules filled with cannabis oil — a decision she credits with helping effectively treat Mykayla’s cancer.

Erin Purchase began giving her daughter about a gram of cannabis oil a day in capsule form, one pill in the morning and one at night, despite encountering resistance from Mykayla’s first doctor. Purchase told ABC News that doctor “blew up” and told her to transfer Mykayla to another facility. But Purchase says she knows she’s making the right decision for her daughter:

At first, Mykayla wasn’t responding well to her treatment, and doctors said she might need a bone marrow transplant. Then she started taking the cannabis oil pills. her mother said. By early August, Mykayla was in remission and the transplant was no longer necessary.

“I don’t think it’s just a coincidence,” Purchase said. “I credit it with helping — at least helping — her ridding the cancer from her body.” [...]

Before Mykayla was diagnosed, Purchase had read about another young boy with cancer who received cannabis oil for nearly two years because his parents believed it kept him alive so much that they defied doctors’ orders and broke Montana law to give it to him. She said she knew it was what she would do for her children if they ever got sick.

Cash “Cashy” Hyde died Nov. 14 at four years old, but his parents say he was never in any pain because of the oil.

U.S. medical professionals typically warn against using cannabis to treat children, since there haven’t been widespread clinical trials to study its long-term effects on development or its impact on the immune system. But more than 200 medical studies have documented cannabis’ overall medical benefits, and some international studies even suggest that the active ingredient in marijuana could be effective at fighting cancer cells specifically. Medical marijuana advocacy groups point out that the issue is largely cyclical — the federal government often won’t invest in additional research because the drug is listed as Schedule I, while working to reclassify it is an uphill battle without further studies to help scientists reach a consensus.

Regardless of the political fight over medical marijuana, some parents like Purchase do rely on cannabis to alleviate their children’s pain. And Purchase believes it’s been essential in helping her daughter get better. When McKayla skips her capsule, she often suffers from nausea and even the smell of food can make her throw up — but when McKayla takes her cannabis dose, it’s a different story: “She doesn’t use pain pills or nausea pills. She has not even lost a single pound since her diagnosis.”

The increasing number of teenage girls who are incarcerated in juvenile detention centers have enormous health care needs: 90 percent have experienced physical, sexual, or emotional abuse; 41 percent have signs of vaginal injury consistent with sexual assault; and a third have been or are currently pregnant, according to the National Girls Health and Justice Institute. For many of them, the detention centers may be their only access to health care.

But the centers’ health systems often do not match the health care needs of teenage girls — so preliminary screenings when the girls arrive are likely to miss serious issues, according to Kaiser Health News:

The door remains open for security purposes, with guards and new residents passing by. Without privacy, girls are unlikely to reveal important health information, especially when they have previously been victimized, says Leslie Acoca, a psychologist and researcher who has studied the health care of girls in detention for more than a decade. [...]

There are a handful of questions given only to girls: Are you pregnant? If so, have you started prenatal care? What form of birth control do you use?

During the screen, however, Reylene didn’t mention a major health issue: painful red burns across her breasts.

“Usually I’m pretty straightforward, but, like, I lied to [the nurse] when I first came in here, about my burns,” says Reylene, who explains that she doesn’t know exactly what happened because she was passed out when she was burned.

The nurse saw the burns through her tank top, but Reylene was evasive because she didn’t want them to be investigated. “If we’re in the detention center … we don’t know who to trust, because we’re vulnerable,” she says.

Reylene says she had to ask several times for ointment.

Instead of sending girls through the same system as boys, Acoca created a health questionnaire to replace the current intake procedure. That way, either a nurse can ask the 132 questions on the Girls Health Screen or a girl can answer them on a computer instead of having to explain an issue in public. While some argue the system takes too long, Acoca said her research shows that poor physical health increases the likelihood that girls would be repeat offenders, so addressing concerns early potentially could help limit recidivism.

Outside of juvenile detention centers, Obamacare has made gains to close the health care gaps between men and women, since insurance companies can no longer charge women more for the same services simply based on their gender. And under the health care reform law, insurance companies must cover a wide range of important preventative health services specific to women — such as contraceptive services, cancer screenings, STI testing and counseling, and annual check-ups — at no additional cost. It is just as important that incarcerated teenage girls also have fair access to health care services that meet their gendered needs.

Voters across the country rejected radical anti-choice legislation in this month’s election, and far-right candidates whose campaigns centered on denying women abortion access overwhelmingly lost their races. But that doesn’t mean anti-choice activists are giving up the War on Women quite yet. Republican lawmakers in Arkansas are already looking ahead to the new year, when they plan to push for a slew of anti-choice legislation now that the state has elected more conservatives to office.

As the Associated Press reports, abortion opponents in Arkansas are seizing a new opportunity to revisit their anti-choice agenda now that the election is over — even though their efforts failed during this past legislative session:

Fresh off an election where Republicans won control of the state House and Senate for the first time in 138 years, GOP lawmakers and anti-abortion groups are now focusing on a handful of bills they believe have a better chance. [...]

“I will say that basically any opportunity now is more than any opportunity than we had in the previous session,” said Rep. Andy Mayberry, R-Hensley.

Mayberry said he plans to reintroduce legislation next year that would ban abortion at 20 weeks of pregnancy, based on the disputed claim that a fetus can feel pain after that point. Mayberry’s bill was one of 10 anti-abortion measures that failed to clear the House Public Health Committee during last year’s session, and it’s one of three measures that Arkansas Right to Life says it plans to push for in the legislative session that begins Jan. 14.

A similar 20-week ban on abortions enacted in Arizona is currently being considered in court after the ACLU sued to block it, citing the law’s “truly, horrifically narrow” medical exception that could prevent women from getting abortions even in cases when it is medically necessary for them to end a pregnancy. In addition to Mayberry’s fetal pain bill, anti-choice activists hope Arkansas’ newly elected Republican lawmakers can push through measures to prevent the state’s health insurance exchange from offering coverage for abortion services and ban doctors from administering the abortion pill through video supervision in rural health clinics.

And Arkansas isn’t the only state where anti-choice lawmakers are eager to get back to work on crafting legislation to deny women their reproductive rights. Ohio lawmakers are taking advantage of the current lame duck session to push through measures to restrict abortion access and defund Planned Parenthood, and right-wing activists in Wisconsin are encouraging lawmakers to consider bills to force mandatory ultrasounds upon women seeking abortions.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is following the lead of his Republican counterparts in the House and calling on Democrats to cut Obamacare as part of the fiscal cliff negotiations, despite the law’s ability to reduce the deficit and lower the rate of growth in health care spending.

Speaking on the Senate floor on Tuesday morning, McConnell said Democrats must embrace changes to entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid and insisted that the Affordable Care Act should also be on the table:

McCONNELL: And as Congress looks for savings, we need to look at the new health care entitlements too. While Democrats and Republicans may disagree on Obamacare, it’s ridiculous to suggest that we make changes to Medicare and Medicaid, while leaving $1.6 trillion in Obamacare spending untouched.

But repealing or significantly scaling back Obamacare doesn’t make any sense: the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the law reduces the deficit by billions in the next decade and by over $1 trillion in the decade after that. Its cost control mechanisms — the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), the excise tax on high-cost plans, and savings to Medicare — are also projected to lower health care spending.

Over 40 people — mostly children — across dozens of states have contracted salmonella after consuming peanut butter that was manufactured at a Sunland Inc. plant and sold at Trader Joe’s grocery stores. But thanks to the increased authority that the Food and Drug Administration gained under the 2011 food safety law, the agency was able to halt production at the country’s largest organic peanut butter company on Monday after confirming traces of salmonella at one of Sunland’s processing plants.

This marks the first time FDA officials have used their new regulatory muscle since President Obama signed the food safety bill into law last year. As an FDA official explained to USA Today, the agency wasn’t able to act as quickly to stem potential public health outbreaks before that legislation took effect:

The food safety law gave the FDA authority to suspend a company’s registration when food manufactured or held there has a “reasonable probability” of causing serious health problems or death. Before the food safety law was enacted early last year, the FDA would have had to go to court to suspend a company’s registration. [...]

Michael Taylor, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for foods, said the FDA’s ability to suspend a registration like this one is a major step forward for the agency.

“Consumers can be assured that products will not leave this facility until we determine they have implemented preventive measures that are effective to produce safe products,” Taylor said.

Throughout the course of the the FDA’s investigation into Sunland, agency officials found evidence of salmonella in 28 different locations in the processing plant. Inspectors also reported unclean equipment in the facility, improper handling of food products, and uncovered containers of peanuts that were exposed to rain and birds outside the plant. And records from previous FDA inspections in 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 note many of the same issues.

The 2011 food safety law represents the biggest overhaul to food safety legislation over the past 70 years. Once fully in effect, it will help safeguard American consumers by implementing stronger controls on imported foods, establishing minimum standards for fruit and vegetable safety, encouraging state and local health agencies to work collaboratively to meet public health goals, and — just as in this case — giving the FDA more oversight to conduct frequent inspections and order immediate recalls of tainted products. About 50 million Americans contract foodborne illnesses annually, which costs the U.S. an estimated $152 billion a year thanks to the costs of treating food poisoning.