One of Obamacare’s major approaches to tackling skyrocketing health care costs is by encouraging a healthier citizenry through a combination of healthy-living incentives to doctors and patients and free preventative care services for Americans. Smoking cessation efforts have been a major part of those preventative efforts — and with good reason, since cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death in America, and localities that engage in aggressive anti-smoking efforts tend to see a substantial return on their investment.

But a recent study by the public health advocacy group Tobacco Free Kids finds that there is a large amount of confusion over the rules governing smoking cessation in qualifying health plans, as Kaiser Health News reports:

[W]hen researchers at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute examined 39 health plans in six states, they found that coverage for smoking cessation was often confusing. Many contracts didn’t clearly state that the coverage was available, didn’t cover recommended treatments and/or didn’t provide it without cost-sharing.

“The study points out the need for the Department of Health and Human Services to provide much more specific guidelines,” Myers says.

Insurers offer a different perspective. “The final rules [for preventive services] recognized that there wasn’t necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach,” says Susan Pisano, a spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group. “So we would expect to see variation around the methods that plans are using.” In addition, she said AHIP’s own survey of plans found that nearly all offer some type of intervention for tobacco users.

It isn’t surprising that AHIP is content with the current fragmented coverage. Covering smoking cessation programs as preventative care, without charging Americans a co-pay, ultimately translates into higher costs for the insurance companies that AHIP represents. Fortunately, though, the health care reform law is less interested in guarding insurers’ profits and more interested in reducing Americans’ medical costs by encouraging them to improve their health. So better guidelines should naturally follow.

Especially considering the fact that recent Obamacare rules also allow insurance companies — to an extent — to charge American smokers higher premiums than non-smokers, it would be unfair to Americans if the federal government did not offer clearer guidelines on the preventative services that smokers will receive in return for their health care payments.

The designation of anti-smoking programs as freely available preventative services has also been extended to the seniors on Medicare.

In the renewed debate over gun control sparked by the mass shooting in Newtown, CT, one of the most widely discussed data points has been the case study in Australia — where, following the worst mass shooting in the nation’s history, gun control policy may have effectively suppressed gun-related suicides.

On April 28, 1996, a gunman shot and killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania. In response, Australian Prime Minister John Howard — a close alley of President George W. Bush — oversaw the passage of sweeping new gun control legislation. Semiautomatic and automatic rifles and shotguns were banned, and a mandatory government buyback program was enacted to collect those weapons. The results, rounded up by the Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews and Slate’s Will Oremus, were striking:

[H]omicides by firearm plunged 59 percent between 1995 and 2006, with no corresponding increase in non-firearm-related homicides. The drop in suicides by gun was even steeper: 65 percent. Studies found a close correlation between the sharp declines and the gun buybacks. Robberies involving a firearm also dropped significantly. Meanwhile, home invasions did not increase, contrary to fears that firearm ownership is needed to deter such crimes. But here’s the most stunning statistic. In the decade before the Port Arthur massacre, there had been 11 mass shootings in the country. There hasn’t been a single one in Australia since.

Since there was no corresponding rise in homicides or suicides not involving firearms, individuals weren’t simply shifting to other methods to harm themselves or others. They were actually deciding against committing acts of violence in the absence of easy access to guns. Researchers found that a buyback of 3,500 guns per 100,000 people reduced the firearm suicide rate by as much as 74 percent:

This isn’t the first time that public health researchers have pointed out the relationship between gun possession and suicide. For instance, when Israel stopped allowing its soldiers to take their guns home and had them leave them on base, suicides on weekends dropped 60 percent among the country’s soldiers. The impulse to commit suicide is temporary — so if the density of guns within a population goes down, then so does the chance that any person’s momentary desire to take their own life will intersect with access to a firearm.

Here in the United States, however, the suicide rate and the instances of gun-inflicted wounds have both been on the rise. Some reports suggest the Great Recession increased the U.S. suicide rate fourfold, since economic downturns put an outsized strain on mental health — but that time period also coincided with widespread cuts to mental health services across state budgets.

During his address in the wake of last Friday’s tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, President Obama lamented that the children who survived the shooting have had their innocence “torn away from them too early.” As this latest tragedy has highlighted America’s underfunded and inadequate mental health system, some do wonder if the trauma from the shooting will leave those survivors with long-term mental and emotional health problems.

But according to the New York Times, even young children are mentally resilient, and the available empirical data suggests that the survivors of Sandy Hook will be emotionally stable in the end:

“Most kids, even of this age, are resilient,” said Dr. Glenn Saxe, chairman of child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center. “The data shows that the majority of people after a trauma, including a school assault, will end up doing O.K.”

In a 2007 Duke University study that psychiatrists say is nationally representative, only 13 percent of people who had experienced a traumatic event before age 16 developed symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder, and less than 1 percent developed “full-blown” PTSD. Over all, more than two-thirds of the 1,420 children surveyed reported experiencing some kind of trauma.

“Like recovering from surgery, you could end up with a scar, and depending on the surgery it could be a big one,” said Dr. Don Bechtold, medical director of the Jefferson Center for Mental Health in Wheat Ridge, Colo. “People get better — the extent of what ‘better’ means is relative.”

It is difficult to predict exactly how such trauma might manifest itself in shooting survivors’ mental health, but it is possible to improve the mental health treatment available to them. Mental health services have been the target of budget and benefit cuts year after year in America — particularly during the recession — leading many Americans to resort to the public education or penal systems to access those services. Furthermore, studies estimate that a full 70 percent of children who need mental health care do not receive it.

Two and a half years, two elections, and one Supreme Court case after Obamacare was enacted as the law of the land, a South Carolina lawmaker is threatening any official who helps implement the measure with a five-year prison sentence.

State Rep. Bill Chumley (R), who represents Spartanburg, pre-filed legislation last week to criminalize the legally-required implementation of Obamacare. U.S. News & World Report has more:

If his bill becomes law, any state official caught enforcing the healthcare law would be guilty of a misdemeanor and “must be fined not more than one thousand dollars or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”

Federal officials caught enforcing the law, however, would be given stiffer punishment under the proposal.

Any federal employee or contractor enforcing the law “is guilty of a felony and, upon conviction, must be fined not more than five thousand dollars, or imprisoned not more than five years, or both,” the bill proposes.

Of course, Chumley’s proposal is as unconstitutional as it is ridiculous. The Constitution establishes federal law as the supreme law of the land, trumping state law.

Still, Chumley’s is not a lonely quest. Though Gov. Nikki Haley (R) hasn’t weighed in on the proposal yet, state Sen. Lee Bright “is proposing similar legislation in the legislature’s upper chamber.” Republicans handily control both chambers of the legislature.

Unfortunately, conservative lawmakers in South Carolina are not the only ones to embrace such an extreme proposal. Last month, nine Wisconsin legislators backed a similar bill expressing their belief that Obamacare is unconstitutional and threatening to arrest any officials who tried to implement it in the state.

After months of pressure, the government of Ireland has decided to introduce draft legislation in the Irish Parliament that would, along with new regulations, potentially loosen the country’s sharp restrictions on abortion.

The decision has the potential to be extremely controversial in a land where an effective ban remains in place despite a 1992 ruling by the Irish Supreme Court that abortion is legal in some circumstances. It’s the controversy surrounding what those circumstances entail that will finally be clarified by the government:

In a statement this afternoon, [Irish Health Minister Dr. James] Reilly said he was very conscious of the sensitivities around the issue of abortion. “I know that most people have personal views on this matter. However, the Government is committed to ensuring that the safety of pregnant women in Ireland is maintained and strengthened. We must fulfill our duty of care towards them.

“For that purpose, we will clarify in legislation and regulation what is available by way of treatment to a woman when a pregnancy gives rise to a threat to a woman’s life. We will also clarify what is legal for the professionals who must provide that care while at all times taking full account of the equal right to life of the unborn child.”

Ireland still has a lengthy debate ahead of it in Parliament, where several members of the Prime Minister’s party have already threatened to “vote against any law that liberalises abortion.” Currently Irish law still criminalizes most forms of abortion and does not provide for the procedure to be carried out in cases of rape and incest.

The pressure on the Irish government to act comes from two sources. In 2010, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Ireland was in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights in their handling of abortion; the government believes that their new action will bring them in line with the Convention’s provisions. More recently, the death of an Indian woman living in Ireland, Savita Halappanavar, in October catalyzed thousands of protesters to take to the streets of Dublin to call for reform. Savita died of blood poisoning following the refusal of a hospital to perform an abortion, citing the unclear amounts of discretion Ireland affords hospitals to make that determination.

Following the tragic shooting in Newtown, CT, the national conversation has been focused on addressing the shortcomings in the U.S.’s current policies on gun regulation and mental health services. In this country, it’s harder to access mental health treatment than it is to get your hands on a gun, partly thanks to widespread budget cuts to state mental health services during the Great Recession.

But some legislators are hoping to change that. Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) is asking state legislators to dedicate $18.5 million toward expanding mental health services — a move spurred by this summer’s mass shooting in an Aurora, CO movie theater, but an especially timely initiative in light of the recent tragedy in Newtown:

The governor’s office said Monday that the services Hickenlooper and state health officials are proposing are aimed at redesigning and strengthening Colorado’s system for taking care of the mentally ill, an issue that has received more attention in the wake of the July’s shootings. [...]

The plan from Hickenlooper and state health officials includes opening five 24-hour walk-in centers for mental health care in Colorado and establishing a statewide mental health crisis hotline. Those two initiatives alone are estimated to cost $10.2 million.

State officials planned to discuss the initiatives Tuesday morning, where the Democratic governor will be joined by state Human Services Executive Director Reggie Bicha and members of Colorado’s mental health and public safety communities.

Hickenlooper’s initiative also calls for additional coordination between state departments to make sure that electronic mental health records get included in background checks for gun buyers. Aside from his desire to better address mental health discrepancies in Colorado, the governor also supports strengthened gun control laws, although he hasn’t proposed specific legislation.

Not every state official is taking similar steps to expand their residents’ access to mental health services, however. Just yesterday, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell proposed a state budget that includes cuts to mental health programs.

Texas legislators — who have already targeted women’s reproductive freedom by defunding Planned Parenthood clinics, making deep cuts to family planning services, and enacting hurdles to dissuade women from seeking abortions — aren’t satisfied with their state’s current threats to women’s constitutional right to choose. Now that they have already either proposed or enacted harsh abortion restrictions, GOP officials are turning their attention to the punishments they want to levy against the women and doctors who don’t comply.

Starting on December 31, Texas’ Health Department will impose even more red tape between women and their doctors when it begins requiring doctors to submit “abortion reports” — forms to document the basic details about the woman who had the procedure, as well as to verify that the doctor followed every step of the state’s law. And, as the Dallas Observer reports, the state will crack down on the doctors who don’t follow the new reporting requirements:

The doctor has to affirm in writing that the patient has been shown a sonogram of the fetus, listened to a heartbeat (if one is present), and shown the Woman’s Right to Know booklet, which still contains thoroughly debunked information linking abortion to breast cancer. There are also questions about the “method of pregnancy verification” and how the “fetal tissue and remains” were disposed of. [...]

Texas law already prohibits third-trimester abortions, except in the case of fetal abnormality or risk to the woman’s life. It already requires forcing a woman to look at a sonogram, listen to a heartbeat and read a medically inaccurate, pink-tinted little pamphlet. So it’s not clear why the state is suddenly demanding extra proof that the doctor has done these things, plus making them outline the “medical indications” that led him or her to perform an abortion.

But the consequences are severe: Doctors who don’t comply with the new rules can be subject to “denial, suspension, probation, or revocation” of their medical license.

But it’s not just doctors who may be at risk of prosecution under Texas’ harsh laws. As the state considers a 20-week abortion ban modeled on Arizona’s current law, lawmakers will also decide on a way to punish the women who seek abortions at 21 or 22 weeks of pregnancy. According the Guttmacher Institute, the women who seek abortion services past 20 weeks of pregnancy are likely be victims of domestic violence. But as RH Reality Check reports, Gov. Rick Perry’s (R-TX) office confirmed that the details of those women’s punishment would be “worked out by the legislature.”

Perry recently reiterated that his “goal” is to completely outlaw all access to abortion services — and in addition to denying reproductive care to women who need it, that initiative is also about punishing the ones who seek it.