Whole Foods CEO and self-styled libertarian John Mackey came under fire this week for suggesting that Obamacare is “like fascism” during a recent NPR interview. He has partially retracted that statement, clarifying that he did not intend to compare the landmark reform law to the oppressive and violent policies of Nazi-era Germany. But he also stood by his central premise that Obamacare is an affront to the ideals of “free enterprise capitalism” in the American health care industry, lamenting that it isn’t closer to the Swiss health care system, which Mackey holds up as a model for the nation.

In an editorial for the Huffington Post, Mackey laid out his prescription for health care reform:

I believe that, if the goal is universal health care, our country would be far better served by combining free enterprise capitalism with a strong governmental safety net for our poorest citizens and those with preexisting conditions, helping everyone to be able to buy insurance. This is what Switzerland does and I think we would be much better off copying that system than where we are currently headed in the United States.

I believe that health care should be competitive in the open market to promote innovation and creativity… There is an alternative to mandated health care in free enterprise capitalism based on voluntary exchange for mutual gain. This alternative allows individuals and businesses to innovate and develop customized solutions to health care where a “one size fits all approach” fails. Creativity and progress are stifled when government regulations dictate the parameters of what health care plans can be offered. Creative businesses, and the people who work them, can make something that has value for all stakeholders.

But perhaps Mackey should have studied the Swiss system a little closer before placing it on a pedestal. The European nation’s health care scheme requires everybody to purchase health insurance from a private, competitive market, provides Swiss citizens who cannot afford their own coverage with government subsidies, and mandates minimal coverage levels in health plans while limiting how much insurers can profit off of their customers. Obamacare is, in large part, modeled off of that exact system.

The similarities don’t end there. But Mackey wasn’t all wrong. The Swiss health care system does have some important differences with Obamacare — namely, a much more tightly regulated private insurance market that, unlike Obamacare, must negotiate its prices and premiums with the government, and employers play close to a non-existent role in providing health benefits for their workers, making the system more efficient.

One medical journal article classified the Swiss system as “a variant of the highly government-regulated social insurance systems of Europe… that rely on ostensibly private, nonprofit health insurers that also are subject to uniform fee schedules and myriad government regulations.” By Mackey’s standards, though, that sure doesn’t sound like “free enterprise capitalism.”

Even though President Obama will be inaugurated for his second term on Monday, GOP lawmakers across the country are still in denial about the fact that Obama’s re-election secured the future of his landmark health reform law. Republicans have been digging in their heels against reform, allowing deadlines to come and go without making any progress toward implementing the Affordable Care Act in their states.

But even in states led by GOP politicians who remain resistant to health reform, like Virginia’s Gov. Bob McDonnell (R), some Republican officials are taking matters into their own hands to prepare for Obamacare’s implementation. As the Huffington Post reports, Virginia Republicans — including some members of the governor’s own administration — are working behind the scenes to plan a health exchange, despite Gov. Bob McDonnell’s resistance to reform:

McDonnell surprised no one when he decided last month Virginia wouldn’t create a health insurance exchange under Obamacare. The trouble, though, is that health care reform is coming to the state and its residents whether Virginia’s Republican politicians want it or not. It’s a reality Republican opponents of Obama’s health care law are facing across the country.

That’s why the McDonnell administration and some GOP legislators are working behind the scenes to get ready, as the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported Wednesday.

Against McDonnell’s stated position that the federal government should do all the work to set up and maintain a health insurance exchange, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported some Republican legislators are pushing for the state to work in partnership with federal authorities, an option seven other states including neighboring West Virginia and North Carolina already have chosen. Twenty-five states, including Virginia, will have a federally operated exchange while 17 states and the District of Columbia will run their own. Mississippi’s case is still up in the air.

Virginia isn’t alone. Even before the presidential election, conservative officials in states like Mississippi, Kansas, and Arizona were working under the radar to quietly prepare their states for the inevitable wave of health care reforms. Those Republican lawmakers have begun to clash with the other members of their party because they realize that resisting Obamacare may not be in their best interests anymore — particularly when it comes to setting up exchanges, which the federal government will simply step in and do for the states that refuse to do it themselves.

New Hampshire has the distinction of being one America’s best educated states, with stellar college graduation rates and students achieving the highest SAT and ACT scores in the country. But Granite State lawmakers may want to brush up on their knowledge about public health and sex education.

According to the Concord Monitor, State Rep. Ralph Boehm (R-NH) introduced a bill to the House Education Committee yesterday that would allow parents to pull their children out of health or sex ed lessons for any reason at all. While New Hampshire law already allows parents to object to certain lesson plans on religious grounds, the proposed HB 161′s wording causes some lawmakers to worry it would give parents carte blanche over the crucial public health education their children receive, and veto power over the educators who provide it:

“In a lot of school districts, this is already the policy,” Boehm said yesterday. “And a lot of schools say it’s up to the parent. But the law says it must be a religious objection.”

Boehm has the support of Rep. Joe Pitre, a Rochester Republican, and Rep. Rick Ladd, a Grafton Republican who’s also a retired school principal. Although, Ladd said he’d like Boehm’s bill rewritten to require parents to give a “justifiable” reason for objecting.

“It can’t be, ‘I walk into the classroom and I don’t really like that teacher, so I’m just going to opt out,’ ” Ladd said.[...]

Rep. Judith Spang, a Durham Democrat on the committee, expressed similar concerns. She talked about the intersection of public health education and sex education and worried that students could be excused from health classes on preventing sexually transmitted diseases under the bill and existing law.

The fact is, sex education works. Multiple studies and real world examples have demonstrated that locales with strong sex education programs have lower rates of STIs and teen pregnancy.

But buoyed by the conservative religious right’s intensive lobbying, Republican state lawmakers have kept abstinence-only programs the norm and comprehensive sex education programs optional, making America more regressive on sex education policy than many Catholic countries. It should come as no surprise that American youth are woefully ignorant about sexual health and safety as a consequence.

Luckily, the trend may be limited. Recent surveys have shown that even Evangelical youth are moving away from an anti-contraception and anti-sex education mindset.

Underscoring the complexity of protecting consumers in an age of accelerating technological innovation, NPR reports that some insurance companies specializing in life insurance and long-term care can choose to discriminate against Americans based on their genetic makeup — and the companies could even subject prospective customers to genetic testing.

Thanks to the 2007 Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) successfully championed by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), health insurers cannot use a patient’s genetic information in order to hike their premium rates or curb benefits. “There were countless people in this country who were not eligible for insurance at all, simply by the way they were born,” Slaughter told NPR.

But GINA does not extend to the types of supplemental insurance that Americans predisposed to genetically-linked, degenerative diseases like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s are likely to purchase, leaving consumers’ premiums susceptible to their genome and pushing essential long-term care costs onto patients:

“GINA was a fabulous accomplishment,” says Robert Green, a researcher in the genetics department at Harvard Medical School. “It was long in coming and much needed. But I think that it was not perfect.”

Green oversaw a study that examined how people react after they learn they have ApoE4, a gene associated with Alzheimer’s. He found that people who discover they have the gene are five times more likely than the average person to go out and buy long-term-care insurance.[...]

Green says it’s especially ironic that GINA does not apply to long-term-care insurance policies, since they cover the costs of nursing homes, assisted living facilities, home health aides and other things that people with Alzheimer’s disease often need to use.

Long-term care insurers assert that not being able to incorporate information about consumers’ genetic dispositions into their premium rates would make their businesses unsustainable. It’s true that Americans who need long-term care are almost certain to be sicker and, therefore more costly to their insurance companies, than those with standard health coverage. But on the other hand, the services covered under such insurance plans — such as home assistance and health aides — are far more rudimentary than the complex and specialized medical treatments covered under standard insurance, so permanently charging Americans higher premiums because of their genetics ends up being excessive and discriminatory.

Other than extending GINA protections to long-term care and life insurance, lawmakers could also address the disparity by requiring health insurance plans to have more long-term care options, perhaps by making such care an “essential health benefit” under Obamacare.

And the issue of human genetics is likely to remain at the forefront of policy debates for the foreseeable future. The Supreme Court is already slated to hear a case on whether or not corporations can patent the detection of certain cancer-causing genes.

The University of North Carolina’s administration may have pressured Melinda Manning, the former assistant dean of students, to underreport cases of sexual assault on UNC’s campus in 2011. Manning, three current students, and one former student filed a compliant this week alleging the university has violated federal law by mishandling sexual assault incidents — and ultimately “facilitating a hostile environment” for students attempting to report sexual crimes.

Manning resigned from UNC last month over the administration’s poor treatment of rape survivors. She told the Huffington Post it was “absolutely heartbreaking” to watch victims of sexual assault being asked inappropriate questions about their experiences, and sometimes even being blamed for their own rape, as they attempted to seek help from the university’s judicial system.

And the complaint she filed with the U.S. Department of Education — obtained by the UNC student paper, the Daily Tar Heel — details the issues going all the way up to the highest levels of the university’s administration, who pressured her to suppress the actual levels of sexual assault on campus:

The complaint alleges Manning was told by the University Counsel’s office that the number of sexual assault cases she compiled for 2010 was “too high” before the total was decreased by three cases without her knowledge; that she was made the victim of a hostile work environment in the dean of students office; and that her efforts to reform the University’s handling of sexual assault cases were stymied more than once by higher administrators. [...]

“(Manning) was told by a member of University Counsel staff that the ‘number of reports was too high’ and she was asked to ‘look over the numbers again,’” the complaint states. “For two weeks, she received multiple phone calls from various members of University Counsel staffasking her to ‘make sure that her numbers were correct.’ ”

The number of sexual assaults that appeared in that year’s Clery report was three lower than the number Manning submitted to the Office of University Counsel, the document states.

The University reported six incidents of forcible sex offenses on campus for 2009, 19 for 2010, the year for which Manning was asked to compile statistics, and 12 for 2011.

Under the Clery Act, colleges and universities must disclose crime statistics to the federal government each year. The maximum fine for violating the act is $35,000 per incident. This week’s complaint was filed on behalf of over 60 UNC students who are survivors of sexual assault, suggesting the actual rate of sexual crime on campus is nowhere near the rates that get reported.

Colleges across the country have struggled with adequately addressing issues of rape culture and sexual assault on their campuses. But the UNC students spearheading the backlash against the administration — who have also started a petition to pressure university officials to “take action against the culture of sexual violence and hostility at UNC” — want to achieve substantial policy changes across the nation before the media conversation moves on.

“I want this case at UNC to affect policies that are in effect at Oregon,” one of the students who added her name to the official complaint told the Huffington Post. “You hear about Amherst, then it dies down; you hear about Yale, then it dies down. We’re tired of it just popping up and everyone saying it’s really horrible and then nothing happens.”

As the 40th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision approaches, anti-abortion fervor is reaching a fever pitch in some conservative areas. At Alabama’s Women Center for Reproductive Alternatives — one of just a few reproductive health resources in the entire state — anti-abortion protests have been intensifying for the past several months, culminating in at least one arrest and increased numbers of volunteer clinic escorts working to safeguard the women walking to and from the health center.

Since state law requires the Alabama Women’s Center to list the days when abortion procedures might be performed, anti-abortion protesters are able to plan their harassment for days when the women visiting the clinic are likely to be seeking an abortion. The protesters are now monitored by local police officers, and clinic escorts will park women’s cars for them so they can slip into the back door of the clinic to avoid confrontations.

Pamela Watters, one of the women’s health advocates who helps organize clinic escorts, told the Alabama press what the volunteers have been up against since they started escorting women in October:

This week, pro-life protestor Joyce Fecteau, 70, was arrested for assault based on an incident alleged to have happened the week of Christmas. A pro-choice protestor told police that Fecteau sprayed her in the face with what Fecteau says is holy water.

Fecteau told The Huntsville Times that she was spritzing holy water to cleanse the air of smoke from a pro-choicer’s sage smudge, and that the pro-choice protestor walked into the spray. [...]

Pro-choice marchers recalled a particularly painful event last month when a woman whose baby had died en utero was coming to the clinic to have it removed. In an awful coincidence, that was the day, Watters said, when the pro-life demonstrators collected a children’s choir on the sidewalk to sing “Happy Birthday Dead Baby” to anyone driving in.

“Will had to physically restrain the father,” Watters said, nodding to one of the men marching in a pro-choice jacket. “And by the time she walked through them, she was an emotional wreck.”

Even though Roe has guaranteed women’s constitutional right to an abortion for nearly 40 years, the case study in Alabama highlights the anti-choice activity that works to undermine legal abortion services at the state level. Alabama already places some of the nation’s most stringent restrictions on women who seek abortions. Women are required to receive counseling intended to talk them out of terminating their pregnancy, undergo a 24 hour waiting period, and take a mandatory ultrasound. Late term abortions are not permitted, and insurance plans in the state’s health exchange won’t cover abortion services. Nonetheless, anti-abortion activists aren’t satisfied — they also want to physically and emotionally intimidate the women coming and going from women’s health clinics.

Over the past two decades, incidents of violent harassment at abortion clinics have been on the rise. Research suggests that restrictive abortion legislation — such as the multiple anti-choice laws in Alabama — could contribute to the issue by creating a hostile environment and encouraging anti-abortion activists’ fervor. In some cases, anti-abortion harassment has actually gotten so bad that it has forced health clinics to close their doors.