The reality of America’s obesity and diabetes epidemics and their resulting effects on national health care costs have been well-established — and on Thursday, a new report revealed that the public health crisis has gotten even worse in the last decade.

According to the report by the American Diabetes Association (ADA), direct and indirect health care costs associated with diabetes rose from $174 billion in 2007 to $245 billion in 2012 — an increase of 41 percent over 5 years. Only a little bit of that can be attributable to general medical inflation, which has actually been slowing down in the last couple of years. The sheer scope of the increase indicates that more and more Americans are falling prey to the disease — and it’s taking a clear toll on U.S. health care spending:

“As the number of people with diabetes grows, so does the economic burden it places on this country,” [said ADA's Chief Scientific & Medical Officer, Robert Ratner, in a statement.]

The study finds that medical expenditure for people with diabetes is about 2.3 times higher than for people who don’t have the disease and that the main driver of the increased overall financial burden on the country is the rise in proportion of the population that has the disease.

“The cost of diabetes is rising at a rate higher than overall medical costs with more than one in 10 health care dollars in the country being spent directly on diabetes and its complications, and more than one in five health care dollars in the US going to the care of people with diagnosed diabetes,” says Ratner.

Diabetes and obesity-related illnesses tend to disproportionately affect populations that are also on government-subsidized health programs — especially low-income Americans — and made up anywhere between 10 and 12 percent of all health insurance spending back in 2006. Considering the new report’s findings, that number has probably ballooned further. The study found that 64 percent of diabetes-related care, specifically, was funded by Medicare, Medicaid, and military health care programs.

Early next week, the European Union Parliament is planning to vote on a resolution calling for a sweeping ban on pornography in the name of gender equality. If it passed, the resolution could be the first step towards a continent-wide ban on pornography on a wide swath of media. But, good intentions aside, that would actually be a bad move for both Europe’s women and the EU’s commitment to free speech.

The Parliament vote scheduled for next week would recommend this resolution on gender equality (which includes the porn ban) to the EU Commission, which would then turn it into legislation which would then, finally, be enacted into binding law by the Parliament. As Wired UK notes, the Commission would have the discretion to simply leave out the provision calling for “a ban on all forms of pornography in the media” — which could well cover all online pornography — in the final law.

But if the ban were to make it into the final law, it would likely do more harm than good. Though a few studies have found that, under laboratory conditions, porn makes men more sexually aggressive, there’s no real-world evidence bearing out the claim that this translates into sexist attitudes or sexual violence. According to Professor Milton Diamond, director of the Pacific Center for Sex and Society at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, “[t]here’s absolutely no evidence that pornography does anything negative.”

There is, however, empirical evidence that it reduces the incidence of sexual violence. One 2007 study by Todd Kendall compared the rates of crime between U.S. states with greater and lesser access to the internet. After controlling for other crime-inducing variables (like rates of urbanization and alcoholism), Kendall found that more internet access led to lower rates of two crimes only — rape and prostitution:

I find that internet access appears to be a substitute for rape; in particular, the results suggest that a 10 percentage point increase in internet access is associated with a decline in reported rape victimization of around 7.3%…internet has no apparent substitution effect on any of 25 other measured crimes, with the exception of the only other well-defined sex crime, prostitution. Moreover, I show that the effect on rape is concentrated among states with the highest male-to-female ratios, and that by age, the effect on rape is concentrated among teenage men, who are the prime consumers of pornography, and for whom the internet induced the largest change in availability.

Two other studies support Kendall’s finding — one correlating the international spread of the internet with a concomitantly international decline in sexual violence, the other presenting survey evidence that, as Scientific American puts it, “patients requesting treatment in clinics for sex offenders commonly say that pornography helps them keep their abnormal sexuality within the confines of their imagination.”

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State Sen. Jason Rapert (R-AR) is the architect of the nation’s most stringent abortion legislation — Arkansas’ “fetal heartbeat” ban outlawing all abortion services after just 12 weeks, which could take effect as early as this spring. But Rapert isn’t content with potentially banning one out every 10 abortions in his state. Now, he’s looking to continue his attacks on women’s health by cutting off funding to Arkansas-area Planned Parenthood clinics.

So far this year, Arkansas Republicans have already pushed through several stringent abortion restrictions — a 20-week “fetal pain” ban, the record-breaking 12-week ban, and a measure to prevent insurance coverage of abortion services — but they have even more waiting in the wings. Now, Rapert wants to target Planned Parenthood with an initiative that will ultimately strip funding from preventative care and comprehensive sexual education programs:

Rapert is now calling for the state to prohibit any state or federal funds from going toward any entity that performs abortions. It’s a measure that’s aimed at cutting off public funding to Planned Parenthood, which doesn’t perform surgical abortions in Arkansas but distributes the abortion pill at two facilities in the state. Arkansas’ only clinic that performs surgical abortions is in Little Rock.

The proposal would cut off money Planned Parenthood receives from the state for non-abortion programs, including federal grants disbursed by the state to the group for education programs in Little Rock schools on sexually transmitted diseases. [...]

Planned Parenthood officials vowed to fight the legislation.

“For many Arkansas women we care for, we are the only health care provider they rely on every year for affordable care including well woman exams, lifesaving cancer screenings, contraception, and STD prevention,” said Jill June, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland. “Planned Parenthood will fight this dangerous bill just as we fought Senator Rapert’s abortion ban — politics should never come between a woman and her medical care.”

Arkansas Republicans have been celebrating their victories in the 2012 election, when they won both chambers of the state legislature for the first time in nearly 200 years, by obsessing over undermining women’s reproductive rights. So far, the abortion restrictions that the Arkansas GOP has enacted this session are more stringent than any other laws adopted in the state’s recent history — including during the 10 years that anti-choice Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) was in office. (It’s also worth noting that although current Gov. Mike Beebe is a Democrat, he has a mixed history on abortion rights and signed the new insurance coverage ban.)

Rapert is open about the fact that his party is moving full steam ahead with its anti-abortion agenda. “For years in the state of Arkansas, these types of bills have been filed but have never been able to see the light of day because they were killed in committee who were not pro-life,” the state lawmaker explained. “That’s why you see these bills making it today.”

Unfortunately, despite the fact that ensuring women have access to affordable reproductive services will actually help lower abortion rates, Rapert’s decision to go after Planned Parenthood is unsurprising now that abortion opponents have successfully transformed the organization into a symbol in their ongoing attack on reproductive rights. Fortunately, courts have blocked most state-level efforts to defund the national organization — but anti-Planned Parenthood crusades like Rapert’s have still eliminated some essential women’s health services in Texas, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Tennessee.

During an interview on conservative host Hugh Hewitt’s talk radio program Thursday night, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined fellow Tea Party favorites Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) in demanding that a continuing resolution to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year include provisions to defund Obamacare in its entirety.

Over the course of the program, Rubio parroted the usual litany of wild — and widely debunked — conservative hysteria about the dire consequences that Obamcare will have on American businesses and the U.S. health care industry, asserting that he would only vote to avert a government shutdown if Obamcare implementation is halted completely:

HEWITT: Senator Rubio, the continuing resolution is headed your way. How is this stacking up as Act III of the spending drama?

RUBIO: Well first of all, I don’t think anyone is in favor of shutting down the government, but I think that’s where we’re headed ultimately here, unfortunately, if we don’t fix our debt problem… But here’s what I’ve said about this continuing resolution. Senator Cruz from Texas is offering this amendment to defund Obamacare. If that gets onto the bill, in essence, if they get a continuing resolution and we can get a vote on that and pass that onto the bill, I’ll vote for a continuing resolution, even if it’s temporary, because it does something permanent, and that’s defund this health care bill, this Obamacare bill, that is going to be an absolute disaster for the American economy. You’re already starting to feel the outer edges of that… I already am running into businesses that are planning next year on not hiring people or laying some people off so they don’t have to meet these mandates. Others are going to push their employees off of their private plans that they offer and onto these exchanges, driving up the cost for the public. So this is going to be an implementation disaster. It’s going to hurt our economy severely. And we’re not spending enough time talking about that.

Later on, Hewitt asked if Rubio would settle for partially defunding Obamacare — specifically, by repealing a provision levying a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices — in exchange for funding the government. Rubio replied, “I don’t know if that alone would be enough” to secure his vote for the continuing resolution, but that he “certainly would support that amendment.”

Defunding the health reform law would devastate tens of millions of Americans who would no longer receive federal subsidies for purchasing health insurance or have expanded access to public insurance programs such as Medicaid. It would also fly in the face of public opinion, since the majority of Americans believe that implementing Obamacare should be a “top priority” in their state. And contrary to some Republicans’ claims, a government shutdown would be a decidedly bad development for essential government services and the American economy at large.

Although we’ve made significant steps forward over the last 100 years, this year’s International Women’s Day is a reminder that women around the world still have significant barriers to overcome. Fortunately, there are some concrete steps the global community could take to advance women’s health and women’s rights. Here are four policies we need to start prioritizing:

1. Reliable access to affordable family planning resources.

Women report that they rely on birth control to help them achieve their economic goals, like finishing their education, keeping a job, and maintaining a family size they can support. But at least 200 million women in developing nations aren’t able to use the contraceptive methods of their choice because they lack the necessary information, resources, or support from their families. The international community agrees that reproductive choice is a human right, but that right is not being realized for women around the world — partly because family planning resources are less of an international development priority than they used to be. President Obama’s repeal of the “global gag rule” — a Reagan-era policy that restricted USAID funding for any women’s health organization that included information about abortion in their comprehensive sexual health resources — was a good start, but without continuing to invest in family planning programs in developing nations, women around the world won’t be able to determine their own reproductive futures.

2. Safe and legal access to abortion.

The Guttmacher Institute estimates that complications from unsafe abortion procedures contribute to 47,000 preventable deaths around the world each year. It’s particularly imperative to ensure global access to safe abortion since, unlike access to contraception, the legality of abortion has nothing to do with actual abortion rates and women seek out this type of reproductive care regardless of the law. Low-income women are particularly likely to be forced to resort to unsafe abortions because they can’t leverage their economic privilege to access the health care they need. And even in some countries in the developing world with more progressive abortion laws, unsafe abortions are still the leading cause of maternal death and injury — partly because women are unaware of the reproductive resources available to them, and partly because a pervasive stigma surrounding abortion prevents women from discussing their options with family and friends.

3. Better maternity care.

Giving birth remains a risky medical procedure around the world. An estimated 800 women die in childbirth every single day, often from preventable medical complications like bleeding, infections, and obstructed labor — or simply from the lack of basic resources, like electricity. In Nigeria, women are dying in the dark because power outages prevent doctors from being able to provide adequate maternity care. Preventing maternal deaths helps keep children thriving, since infants whose mothers die are more likely to die before reaching their second birthday. But maternal care isn’t just about about ensuring women’s access to safe medical procedures — it’s also about promoting policies that help support mothers throughout pregnancy, birth, and caring for a newborn. The U.S., one of just a handful of countries that do not provide paid maternity leave, lags behind in this category.

4. More resources to prevent gender-based violence.

Sexual violence against women remains a tool of war and oppression around the world. Globally, as many as one in three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or abused in some other way. Aside from robbing women of their bodily autonomy, this type of violence also directly impacts women’s reproductive health — leading to unwanted pregnancies, unsafe abortions, preventable gynecological issues, and increased STD transmission. In fact, earlier this week, UN delegates pointed out that the link between gender-based violence and the HIV pandemic needs to be made explicit. In sub-Saharan Africa, women constitute 60 percent of the people infected with HIV — and since gender inequality and violence put women at a higher risk for the virus, international efforts to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic should also be engaging with issues of domestic violence and sexual assault. “Once you empower [women], issues of HIV and gender-based violence will be a thing of the past,” Zimbabwe’s deputy prime minister, Thokozani Khupe, pointed out.

Republicans voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act more than three dozen times, ran on a pledge to eliminate the law on “day one,” and sought to underfund the measure at every opportunity. But since the Supreme Court upheld the ACA and President Obama won re-election the political dynamics of reform have changed: Republican governors are slowly embracing elements of the law and Congressional Republicans are no longer scheduling votes to repeal it.

In another sign of the growing political support for health reform — or the sense that opposing its most popular elements has become politically perilous — a group of top House Republicans have written a letter to President Obama asking him to preserve a temporary program included in the law that provides health care coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

The so-called Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP) was designed as a bridge to the exchanges for families and individuals who don’t have an offer of coverage from an employer and cannot find insurance in the individual market. The $5 billion program, which covers only sick people is incredibly costly, and will soon stop processing new applicants.

Republicans however, are incensed, and are demanding that the White House shift funds from prevention or comparative effectiveness research to keep the PCIP running.

“Your administration’s action will leave thousands of Americans with pre-existing conditions without access to health care,” the group of House Republicans write in a letter first obtained by the Talking Points Memo’s Sahil Kapur. The letter reiterates the GOP’s opposition to the Affordable Care Act as a whole but notes, “to allow PCIP to continue to accept new enrollees, we urge you to support efforts to transfer the funds necessary from other PPACA programs, such as the Prevention and Public Health Fund, the Secretary’s transfer authority to assist with state based exchanges, comparative effectiveness, planning, or another similar program to PCIP.”

The idea behind the PCIP had been advanced by the GOP during Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) presidential bid in 2008, though Republicans had questioned its effectiveness when it was included in the ACA. The PCIP’s relatively low enrollment rates and the government’s inability to maintain the program through 2013, however, is also an indictment of the failure of health policy proposals that seek to further fragment the health system between the sick and the healthy.
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As people around the world recognize International Women’s Day, few would claim that women have achieved true parity. There’s still a long way to go before women see anything near equity, even as countries have made slow but steady progress on closing the gender gap in education, economics, health, and politics.

But the facts are there: If we can help women get on equal footing with men, they will help us all, globally, to succeed. Here are just some of the ways women could change the world, if we let them:

If they had equal employment, women could raise every country’s GDP.

If women’s participation in the workforce increased, it would transform the global economy for the better. One study projects that if the female employment in the U.S. matched the male rates, our overall GDP would rise by 5 percent. In Japan, the GDP would jump by 9 percent. Addressing the education gap would be a good way to start to achieve these figures. The Council on Foreign Relations estimates that each country’s GDP grows by 3 percent for every additional 10 percent of girls going to school.

If companies put women in leadership positions, they’d both benefit.

A persistent global gap in economic participation and opportunity means that not enough women are making it into the workforce — and even when they are, they’re not ascending to top positions. In fact, 36 percent of U.S. companies currently don’t have a single woman on their boards of directors. A study of our neighbors to the north found that Canadian women hold only 5.7 percent of CEO positions at top companies there. In Latin America, there are a total of only nine female CEOs in the top 500 companies. But evidence suggests that gender-mixed leadership actually translates into better profits. According to one study that compared similarly-sized businesses, those with women on their boards outperformed those with all-male boards by 26 percent.

If women were more politically involved, we’d have better policies for our poor.

When women aren’t outnumbered by men, they tend to speak up more for the needs of the vulnerable and advocate for the social safety net. In one experiment that asked groups to set the threshold for public assistance, the groups with fewer women decided on a minimum income of about $21,600 per year for a family of four — close to the United States’ current federal poverty level — but in the groups where women made up 60 to 80 percent of the members, women elevated the safety net to as much as $31,000. In female-dominated groups, women spoke up as much as men, encountered less hostility from their peers, and ultimately influenced their male counterparts to make more generous economic policy choices.

If women were paid more, families would thrive.

The average pay disparity between a man and a woman in the United States is .77 cents on the dollar. That means an American woman could feed a family of four for 37 years with the earnings she loses thanks to pay disparity. If that sounds bad, compare it to the pay gap in Korea, the largest in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. There, women’s paychecks were 39 percent lower than their male peers. Women are increasingly becoming the primary or co-breadwinners for their families, and as they do their pay becomes more vital to the wellbeing of their families. It’s important for the nation, too; economists believe that closing the gender pay gap would be the equivalent of “huge” economic stimulus, and that, in the United States alone, it could grow the economy by three or four percentage points.

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