The Vermont Senate’s Health and Welfare Committee has taken up a controversial measure that would “allow physicians to prescribe lethal doses [of medication] to those with less than six months to live who request the option.” If the bill were to pass, it would make Vermont only the third state after Oregon and Washington to legalize a so-called “right to die” measure.

The bill has aroused significant passions in both supporters and detractors, with each side claiming that their views represent a more humanitarian approach to public health issues for the terminally ill:

Earlier Tuesday, [the committee] heard from former Gov. Madeleine Kunin, who described watching her brother, former state Sen. Edgar May, die last month.

“He told me, ‘I want to die.’ We were all shocked,” Kunin said, as she addressed committee. “He didn’t want to live an incapacitated life.” [...]

Kunin said her brother didn’t need a lethal dose of medication, as the bill allows. Instead, having suffered from a series of strokes, he voluntarily withdrew his medications and had his feeding tube removed. His doctors and family went along with his wishes, she said. [...]

Edward Mahoney, president of the Vermont Alliance for Ethical Health Care, was in the audience listening as Kunin testified. An opponent of the bill who is also scheduled to address the committee this week, Mahoney said her story was compelling but also shows why such a law is not needed. Her brother’s doctors followed his wishes and made him comfortable, Mahoney said.

Kunin disagreed. “I wouldn’t say we don’t need the law. This was a unique situation,” she said, whereas someone else might be in more pain. “We have to respect the wishes of the dying person.”

The bill is expected to receive a full vote in the Vermont state Senate, and the outcome is likely to be close and unpredictable, as the issue has cut across party lines and regular partisan polarization.

Oregon and Washington’s physician-assisted suicide laws have shown that a very low percentage of the terminally ill actually request or utilize them. That lends some credence to the argument that only Americans in dire need of such procedures would pursue them, and that a lack of access to these provisions encourages self-inflected harm and suicide, which might increase the suffering of the terminally ill.

Still, others argue that “right to die” legislation embodies a race to the bottom. Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly voted down a similar law in the most recent election cycle.

Despite the fact that Roe v. Wade first legalized abortion four decades ago, anti-choice lawmakers have successfully chipped away at abortion rights on a state level. Wonkblog’s Sarah Kliff flagged a helpful visual, compiled by Remapping the Debate, to illustrate the recent flood of anti-abortion laws across the country (click to enlarge, or click here to see the interactive version). Five states have at least 20 different restrictions that obstruct women’s access to reproductive services, and Oregon is the sole state that doesn’t have a single piece of anti-choice legislation on the books:

By January of next year, Obamacare will require Americans to have insurance coverage, either through their employer or through one of the health law’s statewide insurance marketplaces. In order to make that coverage affordable, the law provides progressive insurance subsidies in the form of tax credits for Americans buying coverage on the marketplaces and fines companies that don’t cover their workers. But an existing loophole in the law may leave some American families in a coverage gap — and Congress may not be able to agree on a solution to fix the glitch.

The families in question would be unable to afford family health plan premiums through their employer, while also ineligible to qualify for the subsidies to help them buy an alternative plan on an Obamacare exchange. As Modern Healthcare explains, the loophole has to do with the definition of what is considered “affordable” coverage under the law, which is directly related to the federal subsidies that a family is eligible to receive:

Congress said affordable coverage can’t cost more than 9.5 percent of family income. People with coverage the law considers affordable cannot get subsidies to go into the new insurance markets. The purpose of that restriction was to prevent a stampede away from employer coverage.

Congress went on to say that what counts as affordable is keyed to the cost of self-only coverage offered to an individual worker, not his or her family. A typical workplace plan costs about $5,600 for an individual worker. But the cost of family coverage is nearly three times higher, about $15,700, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

So if the employer isn’t willing to chip in for family premiums — as most big companies already do — some families will be out of luck. They may not be able to afford the full premium on their own, and they’d be locked out of the subsidies in the health care overhaul law.

Ron Pollack, the executive director of the health care advocacy group Families USA, told Modern Healthcare, “This is a very significant problem, and we have urged that it be fixed. It is clear that the only way this can be fixed is through legislation and not the regulatory process.”

Unfortunately, that doesn’t bode well for the American families who fall inside of this coverage gap. While Obama Administration officials have called for a fix, the GOP-controlled House of Representatives has been staunch in its refusal to do anything with Obamacare other than obstruct its funding sources. Some Republicans have gone even further than that, attempting to strip away the law’s federal insurance subsidies to Americans in states that choose not to implement their own exchanges, claiming that a semantic technicality in Obamacare forbids assisting Americans in such states from buying coverage — a move that the Administration has vehemently rejected, since it would financially devastate Americans in half of the country.

The IRS has instituted certain regulations in an attempt to mollify the impact of the loophole on American families, ruling that families that fall into that coverage hole will not be subject to the law’s penalty for not purchasing insurance. All in all, very few Americans will actually be subject to the individual insurance mandate penalty, and 80 percent of those who will have incomes higher than the federal poverty level. Still, that may end up being small comfort for the Americans whose employers choose not to pitch in for family health plans.

Mississippi’s only remaining abortion clinic, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, is struggling to stay open as it is faced with unnecessary, complicated restrictions imposed by the state’s Republican lawmakers. But its owners are staying positive — and they hope to send that positive message to the rest of the Jackson community, now that the clinic building has gotten a new, bright pink facelift:

The Jackson Women’s Health Organization over the weekend painted its one-story structure on the corner of State Street and Fondren Place in a vibrant, cheery hue. It’s in contrast to the dark shadow of legal woes that has plagued its operations since last year, when the state passed a law threatening its closure.

“It’s a woman’s color,” said clinic Owner Diane Derzis. “It says, ‘We’re right here, and we’re not going anywhere.’”

Since the paint job, the clinic has fielded numerous calls and heard dozens of comments from people saying they like it, according to clinic Director Shannon Brewer, who said the public reaction has surprised even clinic staff.

But since the Jackson clinic hasn’t been able to comply with the restrictive regulations — the new rules require the clinic’s doctors to secure hospital admitting privileges, but all seven hospitals in the surrounding area have so far denied them — it may be in trouble soon. On Thursday, the clinic received its first official notice that the state intends to revoke its operating license, although the women’s health organization will be able to remain open while it awaits a state hearing on the matter.

Anti-choice advocates claim they’re simply concerned about making sure clinics are safe. But at a closed-door event with abortion opponents earlier this month, Mississippi’s own governor revealed the GOP’s true intentions behind over-regulating the Jackson Women’s Health Organization. “My goal of course is to shut it down,” Gov. Phil Bryant (R) said. But it’s not going anywhere without a fight.

A state senator in Idaho is expressing her distaste for President Obama’s health care reform law by drawing a comparison between the private insurance companies participating in Obamacare and the “Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps” during the Holocaust.

According to Sen. Sheryl Nuxoll (R), Idaho should refuse to set up a state-run health exchange under Obamacare because, although the federal government is using private insurers for the time being, the Obama administration will eventually “pull the trigger” on those companies to establish a socialistic health care system.

Nuxoll posted her comments on Twitter, as well as included them in an email blast to 120 supporters:

The insurance companies are creating their own tombs. Much like the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps, private insurers are used by the feds to put the system in place because the federal government has no way to set up the exchange. Based on legislation and the general process that is written toward this legislation, the federal government will want nothing to do with private insurance companies. The feds will have a national system of health insurance and they will eliminate the insurance companies.

When the Idaho Spokesman-Review asked Nuxoll to clarify her comments, she doubled down on them. Nuxoll said she didn’t mean to disrespect any group of people with her analogy, and explained she said it because “I felt badly for the Jews — it wasn’t just Jews, but Jews, and Christians, and Catholics, and priests. My thing was they didn’t know what was going on. The insurance companies are not realizing what’s going to end up in their demise.”

Idaho’s Senate President Pro-Tem, Brent Hill (R), also stood behind Nuxoll. “This is a very emotional issue for a lot of people,” Hill told the Spokesman-Review. “There’s a lot of ‘stuff’ going around, a lot of information, a lot of viewpoints being expressed. As we get closer to making that decision, the rhetoric’s going to get more dramatic.”

While Idaho Gov. Butch Otter (R) is a vocal critic of health care reform, he has agreed to set up a state-run exchange under Obamacare because he has acknowledged it will allow Idaho to retain more control over its own insurance market. The federal government will simply step in and set up exchanges in the states that refuse to do so themselves. Obamacare’s health exchanges, along with the health law’s optional Medicaid expansion, seek to extend health care to an estimated 30 million low-income Americans who are currently uninsured.

2011 and 2012 were both record-breaking years for new abortion restrictions, and abortion opponents are aren’t showing signs of letting up this year. The “personhood” movement to endow zygotes with the full rights of U.S. citizens, effectively outlawing all abortions and even some forms of contraception, has largely been a failure — but that doesn’t mean anti-choice lawmakers are giving up their quest to redefine the medical terms of pregnancy. The push for “fetal heartbeat” bans is the next anti-choice movement to watch.

Fetal heartbeat measures seek to outlaw abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected — which can occur as early as six weeks, before many women even know they’re pregnant — in direct contradiction to Roe v. Wade, which guarantees women’s right to an abortion until the point of viability at about 23 or 24 weeks of pregnancy. Despite the fact that heartbeat bills are much more extreme than the 20-week abortion bans that are already floundering in court for running afoul of Roe v. Wade, anti-choice lawmakers in at least five states are flirting with this type of legislation:

– OHIO: Anti-choice lawmakers in Ohio first advanced a heartbeat bill in 2011. After the measure was stalled in the state senate for over a year, abortion opponents pressured the legislature to take up the issue again during their lame duck session after the 2012 elections. But ultimately, the bill didn’t come up for a vote because the state Senate leader, Tom Niehaus (R-OH), acknowledged it was too controversial even among abortion opponents. Niehaus said he wanted to wait until lawmakers anti-choice community reached consensus on the measure — which means it could be back on the agenda sometime this year.

– MISSISSIPPI: About a week into the new year, GOP lawmakers in Mississippi filed a fetal heartbeat bill virtually identical to the one that failed to make it out of committee during the state’s last legislative session. Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) has already made it clear that he would sign such a bill if it ever reaches his desk. At a private anti-abortion event at the beginning of January, the governor confirmed that he supports banning abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected. “It would tell that mother, ‘Your child has a heartbeat,’” Bryant said.

– WYOMING: About two weeks ago, state Rep. Kendell Kroeker (R) introduced a measure to supersede the medical definition of viability. Current state law says abortions are prohibited after a fetus has “reached viability,” and Kroeker sought to replace those words with “a detectable fetal heartbeat.” The Republican lawmaker said the idea for his heartbeat bill just came to him one day because “it became clear that if a baby had a heartbeat, that seemed simple to me that it’s wrong to kill it.” On Monday, a House panel struck down Kroeker’s bill because it was too medically vague. But if Ohio and Mississippi are any indication, this likely won’t be the last time that fetal heartbeat legislation shows up in Wyoming.

– ARKANSAS: Republicans in Arkansas also hopped on the fetal heartbeat train this week, but they went a step further — state Sen. Jason Rapert’s (R) proposed heartbeat bill would prosecute the doctors who perform abortions after the arbitrary cut-off with a Class D felony, punishable by up to six years in prison and up to a $10,000 fine. And thanks to the strong Republican majorities in Arkansas’ legislature, this piece of legislation has a good chance of advancing. It easily passed out of committee on Wednesday and is now headed to the state Senate, where 19 of the chamber’s total 35 members have already signed onto it as co-sponsors.

– NORTH DAKOTA: Like Arkansas, the anti-choice politicians in North Dakota want to prosecute the doctors who perform abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected — and their heartbeat ban was part of the “flurry” of anti-abortion bills that lawmakers rushed to introduce around last week’s Roe v. Wade anniversary. A House committee is currently considering the measure, along with an even more radical “personhood” proposal. North Dakota has already imposed some the most restrictive anti-abortion laws in the nation, and women’s health advocates in the state warn that the passage of these new bills “would be tantamount to banning abortion” altogether.

Three of the states on this list — Mississippi, Arkansas, and North Dakota — only have a single surgical abortion clinic left in the entire state, which means women already have to overcome significant geographic barriers to obtain an abortion. If women’s window to access legal reproductive services is narrowed by about 17 weeks, as lawmakers attempt to move the cut-off back from 23 weeks of pregnancy to just 6 weeks, many women may not have enough time to make the trip.

More than a decade after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 15 first responders were the first to receive health payouts on Tuesday as part of a federal compensation fund for victims.

The awards will help victims and their families face the unexpected healthcare costs, lost wages, and suffering that resulted from the exposure to toxic fumes, dust and smoke at Ground Zero. And as of last year, 50 types of cancer that may be linked to Ground Zero exposure are finally eligible for coverage as well.

Thousands have suffered from respiratory illnesses and other diseases since assisting in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and the death toll for emergency responders has exceeded 1,000.

Because of the sheer number affected, the fund “could in theory, according to an actuarial calculation, have to pay $8.5 billion, far more than it can afford.” In 2010, Republicans temporarily blocked the plan in the Senate, and effectively cut down the health coverage able to be provided over the fund’s five-year period.

During a Senate hearing on gun violence prevention on Wednesday, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) issued a stark warning: don’t stigmatize Americans suffering from mental illnesses.

Since December’s mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, lawmakers have been engaged in a debate over the best ways to curb gun violence. Much of that debate has centered on America’s expensive and inaccessible mental health care system, since several perpetrators of mass shootings in recent years have also had mental illnesses. But the conversation has veered wildly off-course — stigmatizing Americans suffering from mental disorders as dangerous, and turning them into the scapegoats for gun violence, as the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre did during his bizarre press conference in reaction to the tragedy at Sandy Hook.

At today’s hearing, Franken tried to stop that train of thinking in its tracks. The senator acknowledged the need for a stronger mental health safety net while also pointing out that Americans with mental illness are not actually prone to violence:

FRANKEN: I have supported funding for law enforcement programs and I work every day to carry out the work Paul Wellstone does to repair our mental health system. Tomorrow I will introduce the Mental Health In Schools Act, which will improve access to mental health care for kids. Catching these issues at an early age is really important. I want to be careful here — that we don’t stigmatize mental illness. The vast majority of people with mental illness are no more violent than the rest of the population. In fact, they are more likely to be the victims of violence. These recent events have caused us as a nation to scrutinize our failed mental health care system and I’m glad we’re talking about this in a serious way.

The statistics clearly support Franken’s argument — over 92 percent of Americans with mental disorders do not engage in violent behavior. The ones who do tend to be violent towards themselves.

That’s also why mental health professionals are concerned that some of the mental health reporting provisions in new gun safety laws — such as the one recently signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) — might discourage patients from seeking care or being honest with their doctors about violent thoughts for fear of being reported to the authorities. Such measures add even more stigma to a public health crisis that is already widely stigmatized in America. According to the latest data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), over 29 percent of Americans who do not receive mental health care cite social stigma or the fear of being institutionalized as the main barrier to their care.

In a new report, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) proclaims that American adults are receiving vaccinations for whooping cough, shingles, and pneumonia at “unacceptably low” rates.

While the report found increases in the number of Americans receiving TDAP — tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis — and HPV vaccines, it also concluded that there was “little improvement in coverage for the other vaccines among adults in the United States.” CDC officials told reporters that the low vaccination rates could have to do with confusion over the proper vaccination schedules:

There were “modest gains” in coverage for the Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis) and HPV (human papilloma virus) vaccines, said CDC researcher and study co-author Dr. Carolyn Bridges during a phone call with reporters. Nearly 13% of people 19 to 64 years old reported receiving a Tdap vaccine in 2011, which was an increase of almost four percentage points from the previous year, she said; the number of adults living with an infant under a year old who received the vaccine was up around 11 points to 22%. Pertussis is particularly dangerous in infants.

Regarding HPV vaccination, adult women are advised to complete a series of three injections by age 26. Thirty percent of women ages 19 to 26 had received one or more doses of that vaccine in 2011, up from 21% in 2010. (In 2011, health officials added men up to the age of 21 to the list of people advised to get the vaccine, but the effects of that change aren’t available in the current data, which was collected in the 2011 National Health Interview Survey.) [...]

During the phone call with reporters, Bridges acknowledged that many adults might be confused about what vaccines they need; schedules vary depending on the vaccine and on a patient’s individual risk. She urged those people to ask their healthcare provider if they were due for any shots.

Even in areas where there has been improvement, vaccination rates are still woefully low — for example, just 30 percent of U.S. women receive one or more of their recommended HPV vaccines. That may partly be due to coverage gaps and a lack of proper information regarding vaccines. But it also speaks to the baffling misinformation spread by conspiracy theorists — and some Republican politicians — regarding the safety and efficacy of vaccines.

Doctors and medical experts have consistently advocated for more robust vaccination rates, and study after study has confirmed vaccination schedules’ ability to lower the spread of infectious diseases. But even during the worst flu epidemic in years, Americans remain remarkably resistant to taking their medicine.

A new study from the Guttmacher Institute confirms that upper-class women are three times more likely to be able to leverage their resources to get a safe abortion when they need one, while less economically advantaged women are often forced to resort to unsafe abortion procedures. Unsafe abortions in the developing world contribute to 47,000 preventable deaths each year, and those fatalities are likely concentrated among young, poor, and single women around the globe.

Guttmacher analyzed health data in Ghana, which actually has a fairly progressive abortion law for the region — the procedure is legal, although only “medical practitioners” can perform it. But the law itself hasn’t changed the reality that women in Ghana face, particularly since most people in the country don’t even realize that most abortion services are now legal. The societal stigma surrounding abortion prevents many women from discussing their reproductive options with their families or friends, and there’s also a serious shortage of abortion doctors in the country — contributing to the unfortunate fact that unsafe abortions are the leading cause of maternal death and injury in Ghana.

And the study found that the women who lack economic resources — particularly the financial independence from their families or the additional monetary support from a partner — are much more likely to resort to unsafe abortion procedures. “As is too often the case, access to quality health services is being determined by circumstances other than need, with the less well-off experiencing the worse outcomes,” Joana Nerquaye-Tetteh, a reproductive health expert working with the Guttmacher Institute in Ghana, explained.

The United States has some unfortunate parallels to Ghana. Abortion access in America has long been inextricably linked to issues of race and class. Restricting access to legal abortion services has an outsized impact on low-income women — who are more likely to fall deeper into poverty if they are denied the ability to make their own reproductive choices.

And, like Ghana, abortion is legal in name only in some areas of this country. Despite the fact that Roe v. Wade has guaranteed women the right to abortion services for the past 40 years, state-level abortion restrictions have slowly chipped away at reproductive freedom across the U.S., particularly in deeply conservative regions. By imposing increasing numbers of barriers for women seeking abortions, lawmakers in the United States are exacerbating the racial and socioeconomic divides that have always stratified abortion access. And as the case study in Ghana proves, that’s going to continue to hurt young, poor, and single women most of all.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) remains a vocal opponent of President Obama’s health care reform law, and she has refused to participate in its state-level provisions, including accepting its optional expansion of the Medicaid program. The governor says she won’t extend Medicaid coverage to an estimated 500,000 additional low-income residents in her state because it’s too expensive — but hospital officials are wondering if she would change her mind if they picked up the tab.

Hospitals seeking to expand Medicaid may propose a “provider tax” in order to cover the cost of the expansion. The hospital industry would be willing to tax itself in order to collect billions of federal funding designated for the states that choose to expand Medicaid, as the State reports:

While Haley has long opposed expanding Medicaid, some of the state’s most influential Republicans and Democrats have not made up their minds on the issue. Advocates say the expansion would bring billions in new federal spending into the state — money that otherwise would be spent in other states — and employ thousands. The expansion also would provide health-care insurance to 500,000 South Carolinians, or one in every eight residents of the state. [...]

This year, the S.C. Hospital Association says it has not proposed a provider tax. But spokeswoman Rozalynn Goodwin said the idea is “certainly worth discussion,” adding the expanded federal Medicaid spending would offset about $2.7 billion in Medicare cuts that the state expects over the next seven years as part of the Affordable Care Act.

The idea for the latest provider tax comes from Arizona, like South Carolina a conservative state with a Republican governor known for resisting federal spending. But Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer surprised many earlier this year when she announced, during her State of the State address, that she supported the Medicaid expansion and using a provider tax to pay for it.

The governor has already said she opposes implementing a provider tax, claiming that hospitals would simply end up passing along the cost of the tax to their patients. But members of the industry that’s an oversimplification of the way that health care works. Because hospitals negotiate what they charge for their services with private insurance companies, they can’t just hike their rates across the board to cover the cost of the tax.

South Carolina’s hospital officials aren’t alone in their support of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. Hospitals across the country have come out in support of extending public insurance coverage to additional low-income Americans, explaining that “it only makes sense” to decrease the number of uninsured people who come to them for care. According to some estimates, states refusing to expand Medicaid cost cost safety net hospitals over $50 billion dollars.

On Tuesday, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) was confirmed as the next Secretary of State by the U.S. Senate. As he steps into his new role, the outgoing Secretary Hillary Clinton will leave behind her legacy — particularly when it comes to the emphasis she placed on women’s health care around the world. Clinton made access to quality women’s health care and the development of stronger international health systems a core part of her approach to diplomacy and worldwide development.

Clinton’s efforts are best embodied by the Global Health Initiative (GHI), a little-discussed yet crucial $63 billion U.S. program rolled out in 2010 that aims to “help partner countries through integrated health systems with a renewed focus on maternal and infant health.” Over the last two years, the GHI has assisted poor nations across the globe by helping them create comprehensive plans for reproductive health services, hospitals that lower the rate of infant and maternal mortality, cleaner medical facilities, and reducing HIV transmission rates.

At the Oslo summit, Clinton listed the ways in which the U.S. State Department — under her leadership — had made global women’s health development a priority through programs like USAID and the GHI:

Through our development agency USAID, we are supporting more skilled midwives and cell phone technology to spread health information. We’re involved in the International Alliance for Reproductive, Maternal, and Newborn Health, a five-year effort to improve donor coordination. We are partnering with Norway and others to support innovative interventions that improve outcomes for pregnant women and newborns. And we are working to ensure access to family planning so that women can choose the spacing and size of their families. Reproductive health services can and do save women’s lives, strengthen their overall health, and improve families’ and communities’ well-being.

And of course, women’s health means more than just maternal health and therefore we must look to improve women’s health more generally, because it is an unfortunate reality that women often face great health disparities. And improving women’s health has dividends for entire societies, from driving down child mortality rates to sparking economic growth. [...]

So we are trying to integrate our programs. And under our Global Health Initiative, each of our country teams now assess how they fit within a comprehensive vision and program, based upon a health plan established by the country where we are operating. And we have worked with partners to develop these health plans in more than 40 countries.

Usually, programs that embrace tenets similar to the GHI — such as PEPFAR and USAID — tend to focus on increasing funding, and they have proven to be quite effective. What makes the GHI special is that it implements an actual organized system that communicates across the globe in order to more accurately assess which policies work and which don’t.

Time will tell just how effective the GHI will be in improving women’s health care around the world. But ambitious efforts like it have been a hallmark of Clinton’s four years in office, during which she has also overseen President Obama’s reversal of the “global gag rule” that prevents US-funded international clinics from even discussing abortion with patients. As Kerry steps into her former role, he will have a solid foundation for improving women’s health care all around the world, and a substantial legacy to live up to.

South Dakota Republicans aren’t satisfied with imposing one of the nation’s longest waiting periods for women seeking abortions. As RH Reality Check reports, the state legislature will also consider a bill that would adopt a “business hours only” definition for its waiting period: while women wait the state-mandated three days before getting an abortion, weekends and holidays won’t count toward fulfilling that quota.

South Dakota’s extreme waiting period was enacted in 2011 and has been tied up in court for the past year — but since Planned Parenthood recently decided to drop the case in order to focus their resources on more pressing attacks to women’s health in the region, it may soon take effect. But on top of the restrictive law itself, RH Reality Check points out that a new bill seeks to further clarify the strict parameters of the 72-hour waiting period:

No surgical or medical abortion may be scheduled except by a licensed physician and only after the physician physically and personally meets with the pregnant mother, consults with her, and performs an assessment of her medical and personal circumstances. [...] No Saturday, Sunday, federal holiday, or state holiday may be included or counted in the calculation of the seventy-two hour minimum time period between the initial physician consultation and assessment and the time of the scheduled abortion procedure. No physician may have the pregnant mother sign a consent for the abortion on the day of this initial consultation.

Mandatory counseling sessions and waiting periods are simply methods of limiting women’s reproductive rights, and they don’t actually help women decide whether or not to have an abortion. Women can make up their own minds, and studies show that nearly 90 percent of the women seeking an abortion already feel very confident about their decision when they first approach their doctors. Unnecessary roadblocks that attempt to shame them out of having the voluntary medical procedure don’t actually work, and simply end up creating outsized barriers for low-income women who may not be able to make multiple trips to a health clinic.

Excluding weekends and holidays from South Dakota’s unnecessary waiting period puts an even bigger burden on women seeking reproductive care, and there’s no good justification for it. RH Reality Check notes that no other state with this restrictive policy defines their waiting period in this way.

Last week, Louisiana’s poor and terminally ill residents won a surprising victory when Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) announced that his state would not stop providing hospice care to its Medicaid beneficiaries. Unfortunately, that’s about the only piece of good news for low-income Louisianans’ health coverage, as the state is still set to implement massive cuts for Medicaid programs that “provide behavioral health services for at-risk children, offer case management visits for low-income HIV patients and pay for at-home visits by nurses who teach poor, first-time mothers how to care for their newborns” this Friday.

While Jindal administration officials argue that the cuts could be mitigated by Medicare and private managed care programs, the reality is that many of these specialty services are simply unavailable — or unaffordable — outside of Medicaid:

Health and Hospitals Secretary Bruce Greenstein said he targeted programs that were duplicative, costly and optional under the state’s participation in the state-federal Medicaid program.

Greenstein said in many instances, people can get the care they’re losing through other government-funded programs. But he acknowledged that won’t happen in every case, meaning some people will simply lose the services or receive reduced services. [...]

Jan Moller heads the Louisiana Budget Project, which advocates for low- to moderate-income families. Moller said he’s most distressed by the cut to the Nurse-Family Partnership Program.

The health department is eliminating the portion of the program that offers at-home visits to low-income women who are pregnant with their first child. Registered nurses visit the women early in their pregnancy and until their children’s second birthday, offering advice on preventive health care, diet and nutrition, smoking cessation and other child developmental issues. [...]

“What the Nurse-Family Partnership does goes above and beyond what a good obstetrician does,” Moller said. “It’s really about teaching life-skills to at-risk moms to make them better parents and make them better able to care for their children, and it’s been proven to work.”

Speech therapy programs for low-income children are also on the chopping block. The cuts — as well as Jindal’s proposals to raise taxes on the poor while slashing public education and other health care funding — are meant to plug a midyear budget deficit. But they are more likely to raise health care costs and poverty levels in a state that already ranks among America’s least-insured and poorest locales by pushing people poor people into finding services that they will no longer be able to afford.

While Jindal has spoken at length on the Republican Party’s existential need to stop being “the stupid party,” the “austerity” policies that he has pursued for his state are some of the most regressive in the entire country.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment used to provide free HIV testing kits and specimen analysis to 40 counties — but this year, it’s scaling back its services to cover just the 10 most populous counties, a move that health advocates warn could end up restricting care for some of the state’s most vulnerable residents living in rural areas.

State and federal agencies are attempting to allocate their prevention funds strategically. Since Kansas is considered a “low incidence” state for HIV, cutting back on free testing in some counties is an attempt to concentrate resources where they are most needed. But health officials warn that the strategy may backfire, particularly because the state’s poorest residents may not seek out preventative care and get themselves tested:

“What we’re really talking about is potentially decreased access to services,” said Michelle Ponce, executive director of the Kansas Association of Local Health Departments. “If there’s not an entity in a community able to provide HIV testing on a basis which clients can afford, it’s not going to be done.” [...]

In Kansas, Medicaid pays for HIV testing if a physician orders it, Wilmoth said.

Donna Sweet, University of Kansas director of internal medicine education at Via Christi Regional Medical Center in Wichita, cautioned that people who live in rural communities where everyone knows everyone may be unwilling to discuss their concerns with a primary care physician. They might not recognize the signs or understand the risks, she said.

“Certainly it’s going to make an impact. People who are poor generally don’t have the money to pay for anything that is not free,” said Sweet, who has been the principal investigator for the Mountain Plains AIDS Education and Training Center since 1988.

State officials note that, since Obamacare seeks to expand the Medicaid program to cover additional low-income people, the health reform law will help improve access to free testing in Kansas because Medicaid picks up the tab for HIV tests. But that’s only true if Kansas agrees to accept the optional expansion and add an estimated 240,000 low-income people to its Medicaid rolls. A Democratic lawmaker in the state recently introduced a bill to expand Medicaid, but Gov. Sam Brownback (R) — a staunch Obamacare opponent — hasn’t yet indicated whether he will cooperate with that provision of the health law.

Obamacare does take big strides to improve access to HIV testing and treatment. But, since the Centers for Disease Control estimates that about 20 percent of all HIV-positive Americans don’t realize they have the virus — which includes half of the HIV-positive people between the ages of 13 and 24 — a widespread emphasis on preventative testing is critical to reach that population.

Gatorade will stop putting brominated vegetable oil (BVO), a synthetic chemical that is used as a flame retardant, into its products after a barrage of complaints, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Although the company has reportedly been considering removing BVO from its beverages for some time now, it was spurred to act after receiving overwhelming pressure from consumers regarding the potentially harmful chemical, including a popular Change.org petition that was initiated by 15-year-old Sarah Kavanagh:

A recent petition on Change.org to drop the chemical – which has more than 200,000 supporters – did not inspire the decision, Carter said, though she acknowledged that consumer feedback was the main impetus.

In the petition, posted by Sarah Kavanagh of Hattiesburg, Miss., “BVO” is described as banned in Japan and the European Union.

The effort quotes a Scientific American article suggesting that “BVO could be building up in human tissues” and that studies on mice have shown “reproductive and behavioral problems” linked to large doses of the chemical.

BVO is used to “distribute Gatorade’s coloring throughout the bottle” equally. The Times also reports that, while Gatorade will stop including BVO in newly produced drinks, there are no plans to recall products already on the market.

The FDA will allow a Pennsylvania-area college to continue dispensing emergency contraception to its students through a vending machine, just as it has done for the past three years, after a politically-motivated uproar last spring prompted a review of the university’s practices.

Back in February, Shippensburg University landed in the national spotlight for installing what may have been the nation’s first Plan B vending machine — allowing students to receive the morning after pill by inserting $25 dollars into the machine in the nurse’s office, rather than potentially being forced to delay taking the pill by scheduling an appointment. Under FDA guidelines, Plan B is already available to everyone over the age of 17 without a prescription, so the university simply verified their rolls to make sure all of their students were above that age as well.

After controversy over Obamacare’s contraception mandate first erupted last year, fueled by the anti-choice community’s widely perpetrated myth that Plan B induces abortions, emergency contraception became more controversial. But the morning after pill (which is safer than aspirin) simply prevents pregnancy within the first 72 hours after intercourse. And recent investigations into universities’ health policies have suggested that it’s not as accessible as it needs to be on college campuses. Shippensburg installed its vending machine after 85 percent of the student body said they thought Plan B should be available on campus grounds.

And after reviewing Shippensburg’s vending machine — which now requires students to swipe their IDs, an extra step to verify they attend the college and are above 17 years old — FDA officials have concluded there’s nothing wrong with expanding access to birth control in this way. “FDA looked at publicly available information about Shippenburg’s vending program and spoke with university and campus health officials and decided not to take any regulatory actions,” an agency official told Public Opinion.

Dispensing birth control in vending machines helps make contraceptive methods directly available without an adult intermediary, which can make a big difference for the teens and young adults who may be too embarrassed to ask a nurse or a pharmacist about it. Last spring, when Shippensburg’s vending machine first drew public attention, junior Chelsea Wehking told the Associated Press she supports it for exactly that reason. “I think it’s great that the school is giving us this option,” she said, explaining she has “heard some kids say they’d be too embarrassed” to make a trip into the surrounding small town to purchase Plan B.