Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), a former hospital CEO and ardent Obamacare critic, announced at a press conference Wednesday evening that he will accept Obamacare funding in order to expand his state’s Medicaid program for low-income Americans. The move comes after Scott secured a waiver to privatize the public insurance program.

The decision represents a marked departure from Scott’s previously held stance. Scott didn’t just initially oppose taking part in the expansion — which the Supreme Court ruled to be optional last summer — he knowingly cited wildly inaccurate figures to inflate the program’s cost to the state by 2500 percent in an effort to discredit it. He eventually dropped his estimate for the expansion by $23 billion in the face of intense media scrutiny. The federal government will pay the lion’s share of funding for states that expand Medicaid, including fully funding expansions for the first three years.

Participating in the expansion will provide medical and financial security to about one million low-income Americans in Florida, a state that has one of the nation’s highest uninsurance rates. But some public health officials worry that Scott’s concurrent decision to privatize the state’s Medicaid program could leave poor Americans by the wayside. An initial pilot program for the privatization in five Florida counties was rife with collusive practices, dropped coverage, and profit-making at the expense of Floridians’ health — but Florida lawmakers claim that they have fixed the problems, citing “increased oversight and more stringent penalties, including fining providers up to $500,000 if they drop out.”

Scott’s decision comes after intense lobbying by Florida’s hospitals, who would benefit greatly from treating low-income Floridians with actual insurance as it would substantially lower their uncompensated care costs. “If Florida doesn’t expand Medicaid, we’re going to have the money taken out of one pocket, we just won’t get it put back in the other,” said Tommy Inzina, chief administrative officer at BayCare Health System.

But regardless of Scott’s motives, his actions could serve as a model for the 10 remaining GOP governors who have still not announced whether or not they will take part in Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. To date, six other Republican governors — in Arizona, Michigan, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, and Nevada — have decided to expand their Medicaid programs. Wisconsin’s Scott Walker recently announced his own alternative plan that, while better than nothing, will substantially limit the number of services and benefits that low-income Wisconsinites have access to.

Colorado Republicans are rushing to condemn the offensive comments about rape recently made by one of their Democratic colleagues — but their attempts are quickly devolving into even more inappropriate responses to the serious crime of sexual assault.

After Colorado Rep. Joe Salazar (D) suggested that women are too paranoid to responsibly carry a gun — a failed attempt to make the point that allowing college students to carry concealed weapons on campus won’t actually help prevent sexual assaults — the Larimer County Republican Women set out to prove that women need more than just whistles to protect them from rape. But they chose to do so by mocking sexual violence itself, compiling a fake “rape defense kit” with a whistle and a pen and labeling it “In Case of Rape, Robbery, or Assault OPEN IMMEDIATELY.”

Photos posted on Twitter reveal that a number of Republican state lawmakers, including the GOP Minority Leader, posed with the fake rape kit (click to enlarge):

Of course, the fact that Salazar implied that women may be too emotional to recognize whether or not someone is actually threatening them is offensive, and reinforces the deeply-entrenched attitude that women can’t always be trusted because they sometimes falsely “cry rape.” But making light of the sexual violence that remains incredibly prevalent on college campuses — an estimated one in four women will be sexually assaulted while they are in college, and university officials have been notorious participants in perpetuating rape culture — is an offensive counter to the Democratic lawmaker’s original comments.

There are real things that politicians can do to make college campuses safer environments for women, and those policy solutions don’t involve debating about guns or dabbling in rape jokes. On a national level, reauthorizing the lapsed Violence Against Women Act would help ensure that college groups have adequate funding for their dating violence programs, critical resources that help educate students about preventing sexual assault.

(HT: Colorado Pols)

Anti-choice Republicans in Alabama are inching closer toward successfully forcing the state’s five remaining abortion clinics to close their doors. On Tuesday, the Alabama House of Representatives approved a bill that would impose complicated, unnecessary restrictions on abortion providers — the exact same type of restriction that is threatening to close Mississippi’s last abortion clinic.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mary Sue McCurkin (R), claims the measure is “truly is a women’s rights bill” because it “protects the right of women having an abortion to have it in a healthy, safe environment.”

But that’s a standard obfuscation in the anti-abortion community. In fact, under the guise of being concerned about women’s safety, anti-choice lawmakers indirectly restrict women’s reproductive rights by subjecting abortion clinics and doctors to burdensome requirements that aren’t placed on other medical professionals. “Ever since we legalized abortion in 1973, there have always been attempts to restrict access to women by overregulation,” Alabama Rep. Patricia Todd (D), who opposes the proposed bill, pointed out during the debate on the House floor.

After three hours of debate, however, the bill ultimately passed by a 73-23 vote. The legislation now heads to the GOP-controlled Senate.

During a segment on concealed carry laws on Fox News’ The Five, host Bob Beckel revealed a stunning lack of knowledge regarding sexual assault on campuses, implying that rapes are a rare occurrence.

Beckel, who is a Democratic strategist, was making an argument against concealed weapons on college campuses. But his train of thought went awry somewhere along the way, devolving into the demonstrably false assertion that sexual assault isn’t a big problem in colleges:

BECKEL: The carry laws, carry laws are around in a lot of states — hidden, carrying guns. If you do that, it seems that the chance of people getting killed –

ERIC BOLLING (CO-HOST): If you eliminate the opportunity for anyone to have a gun at all, you are telling bad guys there is an area no one is carrying guns.

BECKEL: When was the last time you heard about a rape on campus?

BOLLING: What are you talking about? It’s rampant!

Watch it:

Bolling is correct in describing the issue as a “rampant” one, since at least one in four college women will be sexually assaulted during their academic career, 80 percent of them by a known acquaintance. Beckel may be ignorant on the topic, but U.S. universities still have a long way to go when it comes to addressing rape culture and preventing sexual assault on their campuses.

Yet another article has been published bemoaning the declining birthrate in the United States. Perhaps as a result of treating anecdotal evidence gathered from four people at a hookah bar as if it were actual research, this latest piece gets a number of things wrong.

According to the authors, young people no longer want to have children for “legitimate, if perhaps selfish, reasons.” Leaving aside the all the ways in which it is problematic for two men to assert that it is “selfish” for women to choose not to have children, there are still a number of issues with their assessment. First, they do not bother to actually look at what is happening with the birthrate. Yes, the total number of births per 1,000 women has fallen to its lowest point since 1920. But the birthrate for teenagers is also at its lowest point since 1946. That’s probably something we should all feel good about.

In fact, birthrates have only fallen for young women. While the birth rate has declined for women between the ages of 15 to 29, it has remained stable for women 30 to 34, and has actually increased for women ages 35 to 44. And by the time women reach age 40, a whopping 85 percent will have given birth. So the real story is not that women are eschewing motherhood, but that they are choosing to delay it later in life.

Why might that be? Perhaps because the United States remains one of the only countries in the world that doesn’t guarantee paid maternity leave for mothers? Or that in addition to the gender wage gap, women with children experience an additional motherhood wage penalty of about 7 percent per child? Or maybe it’s because unless a woman works in San Francisco, Seattle, or Connecticut, she is not guaranteed the right to paid sick days and can be fired if her baby is sick and she has to miss a day of work? Could it have something to do with the fact that less than half of working mothers have the ability to change the hours or days in their work schedule, and only about a quarter can change the location of their work if a family emergency arises?

A generation ago families could get by on one income, and the most common family formation was a working father and a stay-at-home mother. But times have changed, and today in most families all of the adults work. If people are truly concerned about the birthrate, and not just trying to gain attention by publicly judging women’s reproductive choices, then perhaps they should start focusing more on the structural factors that make raising a child more difficult than it was in previous generations, and less on the colorful stories told by a random group of friends the authors met in a bar.

Our guest blogger is Sarah Glynn, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress.

For the 11th straight year, a record number of Americans have died from a prescription drug overdose, the Tampa Bay Times reports.

While drug overdoses are up in general, a full 60 percent of them now involve prescription medication rather than illicit substances. As Dr. Thomas Frieden of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) told the Times, it’s “a big problem that has gotten much worse quickly,” and most of the deaths are accidental rather than suicide:

As in recent years, opioid drugs — which include OxyContin and Vicodin — were the biggest problem, contributing to three out of four medication overdose deaths.

Frieden said that many doctors and patients don’t realize how addictive these drugs can be, and that they’re too often prescribed for pain that can be managed with less risky drugs.

They’re useful for cancer, “but if you’ve got terrible back pain or terrible migraines,” using these addictive drugs can be dangerous, he said.

Medication-related deaths accounted for 22,134 of the drug overdose deaths in 2010.

Antianxiety drugs including Valium were among common causes of medication-related deaths, involved in almost 30 percent of them. Among the medication-related deaths, 17 percent were suicides.

The surge in medication-related deaths has already forced state authorities to take action. For example, the NYPD has begun implanting GPS chips into medicine bottles in order to battle the illegal trafficking and abuse of prescription drugs.

Still, such tracking efforts remain difficult, and the U.S. doesn’t have a very effective system of tracing a drug from its origins to consumers. And according to a recently-released Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) report, more than half of prescription drug abusers received their drugs from a family member or friend, making public health efforts to crack down on the abuse all the more difficult.

Food regulators recently uncovered horsemeat masquerading as beef in Burger Kings, school cafeterias, and hospitals across Europe and the UK, prompting multiple product recalls and widespread horror. The horsemeat scandal has not touched the US, and many experts and journalists have rushed to reassure Americans that their burgers are safe from horse contamination. But compared to the dangerous pathogens hiding in US-produced meat, Americans might want to consider replacing their beef patties with European horsemeat.

The debacle has exposed weaknesses in the EU’s food safety procedures. However, horsemeat poses a negligible health risk. There have been no reported deaths or illnesses caused by this contamination. Though a harmful horse painkiller called bute was found in 8 of the 206 horses, a human would have to eat more than 500 burgers made entirely of horsemeat to ingest a human dose.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the average American consumes roughly 270 pounds of meat per year, and it’s unlikely that horsemeat is in the mix. There is, however, plenty of evidence that many Americans are inadvertently eating a side of deadly bacteria like salmonella or e. coli with their burgers. According to Center for Disease Control estimates, 48 million Americans get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne illnesses every year. In comparison, the entire European Union had roughly 45,000 illnesses and 32 deaths from contaminated food in 2008. That means foodborne illness strikes 15 percent of Americans each year, but only .00009 percent of Europeans.

American meat also often exceeds levels of contamination considered unacceptable in most of the developed world. Mexico refused a shipment of American beef in 2008 because it exceeded Mexico’s upper regulatory limit for copper contamination. Because the US has no such restrictions, the beef returned to the US to be sold to Americans instead.

The most common culprits behind foodborne illness are salmonella, norovirus, Campylobacter, toxoplasma gondii, and E. coli 0157, which are carried through feces. These pathogens have also been discovered in some fruit and vegetables that have soaked up infected waste runoff from nearby factory farms. But food safety regulators continue to avert their eyes when confronted with the appalling conditions in which the vast majority of American meat is produced. The New York Times highlighted the regulatory failure after a 2007 e. coli outbreak:

Within weeks of the Cargill outbreak in 2007, U.S.D.A. officials swept across the country, conducting spot checks at 224 meat plants to assess their efforts to combat E. coli. Although inspectors had been monitoring these plants all along, officials found serious problems at 55 that were failing to follow their own safety plans. [...] In the weeks before [an e. coli outbreak], federal inspectors had repeatedly found that Cargill was violating its own safety procedures in handling ground beef, but they imposed no fines or sanctions, records show. After the outbreak, the department threatened to withhold the seal of approval that declares “U.S. Inspected and Passed by the Department of Agriculture.”

The USDA is not the only agency that has dropped the regulatory ball. The Environmental Protection Agency recently abandoned an effort that would require factory farms to report basic information, such as their location, number of animals, and the amount of manure they discharge. Congress would go even further; the stalled House Farm Bill included provisions banning all state regulation of nearly any agricultural product. The fast-approaching sequester cuts will also eliminate roughly 600 food inspector positions at meat and poultry plants.

Several states have also passed “ag gag laws” to criminalize whistleblowers who secretly film inside facilities or take a job under false pretenses. These laws became popular after a Humane Society video documented a California slaughterhouse routinely abusing and killing sick cattle in 2008. The video triggered the largest beef recall in US history and resulted in a $500 million settlement, the largest penalty ever awarded for an animal abuse case. In response to the video, President Obama also banned the slaughter of these so-called “downer” cows, which have an increased risk of contracting mad cow disease and bacterial infections like e. coli. He did, however, lift the ban on horsemeat in the US last year.

Universal Orlando, a theme park resort in Florida that generates more than $1 billion dollars in annual revenue, plans to drop insurance coverage for its part-time employees at the end of this year — a tactic to avoid providing its workers with adequate health benefits under Obamacare.

The health care reform law attempts to put an end to several predatory insurance practices, and requires employers to provide their workers with sufficient insurance plans that don’t put limits on essential benefits. Universal would be required to upgrade to a more comprehensive insurance plan under Obamacare. But instead of extending better benefits to its part-time employees, the company would rather drop those workers’ health care altogether:

Universal currently offers part-time workers a limited insurance plan that has low premiums but also caps the payout of benefits. For instance, Universal’s plan costs about $18 a week for employee-only coverage but covers only a maximum of $5,000 a year toward hospital stays. There are similar caps for other services.

Those types of insurance plans — sometimes referred to as “mini-med” plans — will no longer be permitted under the federal Affordable Care Act. Beginning in 2014, the law will prohibit insurance plans that impose annual monetary limits on essential medical care such, as hospitalization, or on overall spending. [...]

Critics of mini-med insurance plans say they ultimately provide little protection for workers, with meager payout limits that are nowhere near enough to cover medical emergencies. Supporters argue they are a realistic option for low-paid, limited-hour workers who can’t afford better plans. [...]

Universal’s announcement has angered some employees, who say the resort can afford to provide more-comprehensive health insurance for its part-time workers. Universal Orlando’s immediate parent company, Universal Parks & Resorts, generated approximately $950 million in operating cash flow last year, up 10 percent from a year ago.

Universal has about 17,000 workers, making it one of the largest employers in Central Florida. Company officials say that only a small percentage of its employees would be impacted by the move to drop part-time coverage, since most of Universal’s part-time workers are covered under a parent’s or spouses’s insurance plan. Still, about 500 people are enrolled in Universal’s “mini-med” plan and can expect to lose all of their current health benefits after December 31st.

The resort isn’t the only hugely successful company to balk at the prospect of providing basic health benefits for its low-wage employees — who typically don’t earn enough to be able to afford to purchase insurance on their own. Wal-Mart dropped health coverage for its part-time employees two years ago. And a wide range of businesses in the restaurant industry — including Applebee’s, Olive Garden, Denny’s, and Wendy’s — have also used Obamacare as an excuse to pass the cost of health care onto their low-wage workers.