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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

California’s state Medicaid program, Medi-Cal, has struggled to remain fully funded as its budget — and particularly the reimbursements that go toward the doctors who accept poorer patients under the program — perennially falls under the knife. And the low-income Americans who need specialist care are particularly susceptible to the shortcomings of the strained social safety net.

The Los Angeles Times reports that poor Americans seeking access to specialist services — such as complex surgeries and neurological treatment — are faced with a dearth of specialists willing to service Medi-Cal, mostly due to its historically low reimbursement rates. And on top of that, the United States continues to face a growing doctor shortage that is leading to long waiting periods for Americans:

By the end of the decade, the nation will be short more than 46,000 surgeons and specialists, a nearly tenfold increase from 2010, according to the Assn. of American Medical Colleges. Healthcare reform is expected to worsen the problem as more patients — many with complex and deferred health needs — become insured and seek specialized treatment.

Many of the newly insured will receive Medi-Cal, the government plan for the needy as administered through the state of California. Clinics already struggle to get private specialists to see Medicaid patients because of the low payments to doctors. Last week, an appellate court decision that authorized the state to move forward with 10% cuts in Medi-Cal reimbursement, which could make finding doctors for those patients even more difficult.

“Specialists are paid so poorly that they don’t want to take Medi-Cal patients,” said Mark Dressner, a Long Beach clinic doctor and president-elect of the California Academy of Family Physicians. “We’re really disappointed and concerned what it’s going to do for patient access.”

This shortage disproportionately affects Americans on Medicaid because the program’s lackluster funding makes it difficult to attract specialists who — after expensive and time-consuming stints in medical school — are willing to take on poor patients for lower reimbursements. Unfortunately, saddled with long waiting periods for specialist treatment, some Americans resort to inefficient and expensive emergency room care, raising health care spending nationally.

Obamacare seeks to quell this problem by vastly expanding funding for states that open up their Medicaid pools to more Americans and providing medical schools incentives for producing more general practitioners and family doctors. But as the LA Times notes, the medical school incentives do not also extend to specialists, and all the extra Medicaid funding in the world will mean little if states do not offer doctors reimbursements high enough to attract their services.

Since the downward trend in Americans becoming doctors has long been in the pipeline, the health reform law is not the root cause of this shortage. But since Obamacare expands the Medicaid program to extend coverage to millions of previously uninsured Americans, it does highlight just how deep the existing shortage is.

In the aftermath of the recent mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, Americans are once again considering the role that mental illness plays in violent crimes, and calling for improved care for the mentally ill to help reduce future gun violence. But although there are serious problems with the way mental illness and psychiatric disorders are treated in this country, future tragedies are unlikely to be avoided if improving mental health care is the only step this country takes to reduce gun violence.

It’s true that Jared Loughner and James Holmes — two men behind recent mass shootings in the United States — had documented histories of mental illness, but that isn’t enough evidence to make the broad conclusion that mentally ill individuals are predisposed to violent behavior or violent crimes. Despite popular perceptions, evidence actually suggests the mentally ill are no more prone to violence than the general population.

Between 92 and 96 percent of mental patients don’t have violent tendencies, and studies show the mentally ill are more likely to be the victims of violent crimes themselves than the criminal perpetrators. In fact, histories of substance abuse and other socio-demographic and economic factors are stronger determinants of violent behavior than psychiatric disorders. The contribution of the mentally ill to overall crime rates is an extremely low 3 to 5 percent, a number much lower than that of substance abuse.

Nevertheless, both the media and entertainment industry often depict the mentally ill as violent criminals. According to Mental Health American, 60 percent of characters in prime time television with mental illness were shown to be involved in crime or violence, and news reports overwhelmingly portray the mentally ill as dangerous.

At this point, it is unknown whether the shooter in Connecticut, Adam Lanza, is diagnosed with or was treated for any mental illness. Some reports have speculated that he may have Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism. But scientific experts agree that Asperger’s is not correlated with violent behavior.

– Greg Noth

Since last Friday’s mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, the media coverage has largely concentrated on gun control policies and America’s ongoing inability to address mental health issues. While the image of twenty dead children makes the effects of gun violence vividly tangible, it doesn’t reveal the full extent of the costs of what some might argue has become an American epidemic.

According to a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study, nonfatal gun injuries and gun-related deaths cost the United States $5.6 billion in medical spending every year, and an additional $64.6 billion when accounting for the lost productivity that stems from gun-related violence:

Worse still, victims of gun violence tend to be concentrated in urban and inner-city regions — the types of Americans who are less likely to be employed or have health insurance, and more likely to pass the cost of their care onto other Americans by relying on emergency room services.

Although the number of gun-related deaths has been lowered thanks to breakthroughs in medical technology, the actual incidence of gun-related violence has actually been increasing.

Following last week’s tragic shooting in Newtown, CT, tens of thousands of Americans have signed their names to a petition calling on the White House to “produce legislation that limits access to guns.” Some lifelong gun advocates have even begun to reconsider their stances and call for “common sense” gun safety policies.

Indeed, since gun regulations vary across states, some states currently impose harsher restrictions on getting a driver’s license, qualifying for food stamp assistance, accessing medical services, or even buying a pet than they do for purchasing a gun. In fact, as states passed dozens of new abortion restrictions over the past year, these are just five states where it’s significantly harder to get an abortion than a gun:

1) ARIZONA: When it comes to gun regulations and restrictions, Arizona is one of the most lenient states in the country. In fact, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg hired undercover agents last year to demonstrate just how easy it is to purchase firearms in Arizona without being subjected to a background check. But Arizona also passed one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country, requiring women seeking abortions to undergo a 24-hour waiting period, an in-person “counseling session,” and a mandatory ultrasound. The Arizona government also recently launched a misleading website dedicated to educating women about the dangerous decision to have an abortion, even though it is a safe medical procedure.

2) MISSOURI: After state lawmakers loosened regulations for purchasing firearms in 2007, there is no longer any waiting period for gun ownership in Missouri. There’s also no limit to the number of firearms that residents can purchase at one time, and gun owners don’t have to obtain a license or register their firearms. On the other hand, women seeking abortions in Missouri have several hurdles to overcome. Women are required to wait 24 hours before they can have an abortion, make an additional visit to the clinic to receive “in-person counseling,” and confirm that they have not been coerced into the procedure. And if Missouri lawmakers have their way, it could soon be more difficult for women to obtain affordable contraception than it is for them to obtain a gun.

3) MISSISSIPPI: There’s no license or permit required to purchase a firearm in Mississippi. The state also doesn’t require any kind of firearm safety training as a prerequisite to buying or carrying a gun, and does not require handguns to meet safety standards. But while lawmakers in Mississippi may not be particularly concerned about gun safety legislation, they are worried about women’s health clinics. After state legislators passed a restrictive regulation to hold abortion clinics to unnecessary standards — an indirect method of limiting women’s reproductive freedom by targeting abortion providers — the state’s clinics were forced to stop performing the medical procedure. There’s only one abortion clinic left in the entire state of Mississippi, and it may be forced to close in January.

4) TEXAS: Texas does not require a waiting period to buy guns, but it does impose a 24-hour waiting period on women who seek abortions. Texans also don’t need a license or registration for their firearm — but women who are looking for health services rather than a gun could be out of luck, since Texas legislators have been on a crusade to defund the women’s health organizations that provide abortion services. Preventing low-income women from having access to health services at clinics that also perform abortions isn’t enough for Texas Republicans, though — they also want to prevent doctors from even talking about abortion with their patients, although discussing guns would probably be considered fair game.

5) UTAH: Utah imposes one of the harshest restrictions on women who seek abortions, requiring them to wait a full 72 hours before undergoing the procedure. The same isn’t true for purchasing guns, since there’s no waiting period whatsoever for buying a firearm. Utah lawmakers may hope that women end up changing their mind about getting abortion if they’re required to wait several days and attend an in-person “counseling session,” but studies have shown that imposing those hurdles don’t actually impact women’s decisions. On the other hand, there’s evidence to suggest that imposing waiting periods for gun ownership can be an effective safeguard mechanism to provide enough time for background checks to go through, as well as allow for a “cooling off period” in the cases where an emotional altercation may have encouraged one of the participants to obtain a weapon.

Now that President Obama has secured a second term, the implementation of his landmark health reform law continues to march forward — but since stubborn Republican governors across the country see themselves as the last roadblock standing in the way of Obamacare, they’re still doing everything in their power to halt that progress.

Last month, federal officials agreed to give state officials more time to design their health exchange markets in light of Republican leaders’ concerns that they wouldn’t be able to turn in their plans in time. However, as GOP governors continue to resist Obamacare as a purely political statement, Politico reports that they have allowed deadlines to come and go without lifting a finger to do the necessary work to prepare for the impending health care law:

The passive resistance of so many governors could gum up the works if the feds have to handle millions of enrollments, questions from confused customers and greater health plan oversight.

As of Friday — the final deadline for states to declare whether they’ll set up exchanges — more than 30 states had refused to set up the marketplaces, which had been expected to become the source of health coverage for as many as 25 million people by the end of the decade. To some of the law’s most vocal opponents, that’s a pretty good way to keep up the fight against Obamacare.

“The more states that opt out of the state-based exchanges, the harder it will be for the federal government to fully implement Obamacare and the more likely it will be that we can turn back the clock and reframe the health care debate,” Tea Party Patriots wrote to supporters ahead of Friday’s deadline.

Some Republican governors say they’re dragging their feet on reform because they still haven’t had enough time to prepare, or because they need more information from the Obama administration to fully understand what’s expected of them. In the lead up to last week’s deadline, several of the Republican governors who have been particularly resistant to cooperating with Obamacare’s implementation — including Florida Gov. Rick Scott, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, and Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer – requested a meeting with Obama to talk over the details of the Affordable Care Act’s impact on their states.

But Democratic lawmakers dismiss these concerns as simply a convenient excuse for standing in the way of Obamacare, pointing out that Republican leaders have had plenty of time to complete their homework. “It seems to me it’s just the latest attempt to undo the Affordable Care Act,” Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) told the Hill. “Let’s not buy into this next line of attack that the law must be delayed.”

Despite what Obamacare opponents may hope, however, the Republican governors refusing to do the work to prepare for Obamacare in their states won’t actually prevent the health reform law from going into effect. The Obama administration maintains that the health exchanges will be ready in time — even if more of the responsibility for them rests with the federal government rather than with state officials.

In the wake of the tragic shooting in an elementary school in Newtown, CT, Americans are engaged in a renewed discussion about how to prevent future mass shootings. But while some lawmakers are working toward legislative solutions to prevent gun violence, Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) is proposing a new budget that could undermine that goal.

McDonnell is proposing a mix of spending increases and cuts to Virginia’s two-year budget that would slash nearly $60 million to state agencies — and, as the Washington Post reports, some of those cuts come from sources many Americans might prefer to be well-funded. Even though the events in Newtown have put mental illness back in the national spotlight, McDonnell seeks to cut $1.5 million from Virginia’s mental health facilities, and looks to save an additional $7 million by closing a juvenile correction facility in the state.

Mental health services remain largely underfunded across the country, as many states like Virginia seek to tighten their budgets to compensate for the rising costs of health care. Only about 7 percent of Americans currently receive some type of mental health treatment, potentially because they can be difficult to afford — mental illness tends to disproportionately impact low-income Americans, but treatment carries high out-of-pocket costs.

Luckily, Obamacare may help improve Americans’ access to mental health treatment, since federal officials do recommend that all states offer coverage for mental health services in the health insurance exchanges they will operate under the health reform law. McDonnell, however, remains a staunch opponent of Obamacare and has refused to work toward setting up a state-level exchange in Virginia.

Fox News Host and former Governor Mike Huckabee (R-AR) doubled down on his claim that the murder spree in Connecticut was caused by removing God from schools, linking the shootings to “tax-funded abortion pills” and society calling “sinful” acts “normal.” Speaking on Fox News on Saturday, Huckabee suggested we should not be surprised “that a culture without [God] reflects what it has become:”

Christian-owned businesses are told to surrender their values under the edict of government orders to provide tax-funded abortion pills. We carefully and intentionally stop saying things are sinful and we call them disorders. Sometimes, we even say they’re normal. And to get to where we have to abandon bed rock moral truths, then we ask “well, where was God?” And I respond that, as I see it, we’ve escorted him out of our culture and marched him off the public square and then we express our surprise that a culture without him reflects what it’s become.

Watch it:

In reality, there are no “government-funded abortion pills.” The Obamacare contraception mandate, which is what Huckabee is likely referring to, does not provide coverage for any abortifacients — and will actually help reduce abortion rates.

Diseases that kill 2.6 million poor people per year receive a miniscule fraction of pharmaceutical research money, according to a new report from Doctors Without Borders. The report surveyed all drugs approved for global use between 2001 and 2011, finding that only 3.8 percent of approved drugs were designed to treat so-called “neglected diseases,” defined as diseases where “treatment options are inadequate or don’t exist, and when their drug-market potential is insufficient to readily attract a private sector response.”

The reason that treating these illnesses isn’t a moneymaker for the pharmaceutical industry is that they disproportionately kill poor people, as the wealthy have access to basic sanitation and other preventative measures that make it very unlikely to contract neglected diseases. Moreover, even when treatment for these diseases get developed, they’re often designed in a fashion that makes them too expensive for the very poorest to afford:

[E]ven when there is enough of a profit incentive to drive innovation – for example when diseases affect both developed and developing countries alike – the resulting products are too often priced out of reach. Developing countries are not the only ones to be hit, as ever higher prices for new medical tools strain the healthcare budgets of developed countries as well, posing access barriers to increasing numbers of people. New drugs to treat HIV or cancer can cost hundreds of times more than a person’s average annual income, and the battle for access increasingly has to be waged drug by drug, country by country, company by company.

Government and philanthropic investment is not picking up the slack: though governments provide twice as much money for neglected disease research as private institutions, the total amount of funding is still half of what the World Health Organization expects would be necessary to address these diseases. Cutbacks as a consequence of the global financial crisis are shrinking this already-inadequate funding pool. In May, the United States opposed the creation of a dedicated international fund for combating neglected diseases.

The problem of unequal access to medical treatment extends beyond neglected diseases. African-Americans and the poor are significantly less likely than other Americans to get access to treatment for HIV/AIDS. Likewise, the inability of developing countries to afford and distribute HIV/AIDS drugs costs millions of lives worldwide.

The cost of health care and access to health care still top many Americans’ list of the most urgent problem facing the nation, and rising costs continue to bite into the pocketbooks of both individuals and the government. Tackling that problem was one of the primary reasons behind the passage of Obamacare, both in terms of its cost controls and its subsidies to people buying care on the exchanges. And bringing the picture into further relief, a new Gallup poll released today found that over one in three Americans have put off medical treatment because of concerns with cost — the highest reported numbers in the last decade:

Thirty-two percent of Americans say they have had to put off medical care for themselves or their family in the past year due to the cost — the highest percentage since Gallup started tracking this annually in 2001. The percentage reporting they are putting treatment off is up significantly from the 19% found 12 years ago.

More than half of those with no health insurance say they have had to put off care (55%), as have 30% of those with private health insurance — while 21% of those who have Medicare or Medicaid say the same.

The strikingly low number of people on Medicaid or Medicare who report putting off health care due to costs is in line with an earlier survey by Gallup that found 76 percent of recipients on those programs are satisfied with the cost of their health care, versus just 57 percent of those on private insurance. It’s also consistent with a recent study by the Government Accountability Office, which found Medicaid recipients enjoy virtually identical access to necessary care as those on private insurance — despite concerns that Medicaid’s reimbursement rates to providers are far lower.

The tragic shooting at a school today in Connecticut, the general increase in such mass shootings in the United States, and the silence of policymakers in the face of the problem all hint at a remarkable contradiction in modern American crime: although medical advances ensure that fewer lives are being lost to violence, incidences of such violence are actually increasing.

A recent report in the Wall Street Journal found that serious gunshot and stabbing wounds rose 47 percent over the last decade, even as the number of homicides dropped during the 1990s and then again after 2007:

Emergency-room physicians who treat victims of gunshot and knife attacks say more people survive because of the spread of hospital trauma centers — which specialize in treating severe injuries — the increased use of helicopters to ferry patients, better training of first-responders and lessons gleaned from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. [...]

After a steady decline through the 1990s, the annual number of homicides zigzagged before resuming a decline in 2007, falling from 16,929 that year to an estimated 14,722 in 2010, according to FBI crime data.

At the same time, medical data and other surveys in the U.S. show a rising number of serious injuries from assaults with guns and knives. The estimated number of people wounded seriously enough by gunshots to require a hospital stay, rather than treatment and release, rose 47% to 30,759 in 2011 from 20,844 in 2001, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System-All Injury Program. The CDC estimates showed the number of people injured in serious stabbings rose to 23,550 from 22,047 over the same period.

Drawing conclusions about causation from those numbers is an inexact science — especially because the process of collecting and classifying information from emergency rooms can be haphazard. “Homicide is the one thing we’re measuring well,” Jens Ludwig, a law professor and the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, told the Wall Street Journal. “Everything else is subject to much more uncertainty.”

But other reports also suggest that trauma centers are improving the chance of survival for victims of violent crimes. A New England Journal of Medicine study in 2006 determined that treating patients at trauma centers, rather than regular hospitals, significantly lowered their risk of death.

According to the American Trauma Society, 90 percent of Americans lived within an hour of a trauma center by helicopter or ambulance in 2010. But the propagation of those trauma centers is a costly endeavor. The Trauma Center Association of America, a lobbying group for that sector of the medical industry, estimates that those centers lose $230 million a year providing the uninsured with treatment — and that’s not including the emergency care they provide for their low-income patients, which is also often funded by Medicaid, a federal program that provides far lower reimbursement rates than private insurers.

Details about Friday’s horrific shooting spree at a Connecticut elementary school are still emerging, and it remains unknown whether the suspected shooter suffered from underlying mental health issues. But the fact remains: in America, it’s currently easier for a poor person to get a gun than it is for them to get treatment for mental health issues.

Most murders committed in the United States involve a firearm — particularly handguns. A quick search shows that a typical handgun can be purchased for anywhere between $250 and $500. A .223-caliber semi-automatic rifle — which some reports indicate was the type of firearm used in today’s attack — costs between $700 and $2000. And contrary to the gun lobby’s most ardent hysteria about Barack Obama, gun ownership has actually been rising over the past four years, as has the use of guns in violent crimes.

By comparison, access to mental health services remains spotty, its funding and beneficiary requirements subject to the whims of governments attempting to balance their bloated budgets. People often do not know when they are entitled to preventative care services for mental health, and the people who do often forgo care due to the stigma associated with receiving such care.

And then there’s the cost of more extensive care. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), a mere 7.1 percent of all American adults receive mental health services. Most of these Americans’ care is covered by private insurance, with children, poorer, and more elderly Americans being covered through public insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. An additional ten percent are uninsured. But out-of-pocket costs for both inpatient and outpatient mental health services remain staggeringly high:

Obamacare will require health plans on statewide exchanges to cover mental health services as one of its “essential health benefit” categories. But states ultimately carry most of the discretion when it comes to defining what these services are and how much funding they get, and the coverage won’t help Americans in the absence of active efforts to identify and treat mental health disorders.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) reports that Connecticut’s public mental health system currently provides coverage for less than one in five Connecticut residents with a serious mental health problem. The other four may not be able to afford to pay for those services on their own, particularly since mental health issues tend to disproportionately affect poor people.

Many states do require mental health evaluations and background checks before allowing their residents to purchase a gun. But doing an evaluation isn’t the same thing as actually treating people with ongoing mental health conditions.

Secret video footage of a hog farm in Manitoba, Canada show workers body-slamming piglets into the floor, swinging them into metal posts and kicking them when they can’t stand up. The harrowing video was filmed by an investigator for animal rights group Mercy for Animals Canada, who went undercover at the Puratone farm for three months. Mercy for Animals Canada — a sister organization of the U.S. group by the same name — released the footage Monday, calling for major grocery chains that carry Puratone meat to boycott the pork producer.

As Manitoba officials prepare to inspect and possibly investigate the Puratone facility, however, an “Animal Care Review” panel has dismissed this type of abuse as a standard, “humane” practice. This panel of researchers and scientists was put together by the Center for Food Integrity, an American organization funded by agribusiness giants including Monsanto, the National Pork Producers Council, Pfizer, Cargill and Purdue. The Vancouver Sun reports:

But the Animal Care Review Panel, made up of a University of Manitoba animal sciences professor, an Ontario Veterinary College professor and a research scientist, says [body-slamming piglets is] a humane way to euthanize piglets.

The panel, formed by the Center for Food Integrity, a U.S.-based organization representing farmers, food processors and retailers, said most of what’s in the video is widely acceptable and humane. [...] The footage appears to show pigs bleeding from open wounds in tight metal cages, pregnant pigs with distended, inflamed bellies, and piglets being slammed down on the floor by staff.

Watch it (warning — contains very graphic images):

The Center for Food Integrity is in fact an industry public relations group intended to “build consumer trust and confidence in the contemporary U.S. food system by sharing accurate, balanced information, correcting misinformation, modeling best practices and engaging stakeholders to address issues that are important to consumers.” In a recent example of this “accurate, balanced information,” CFI encourages companies to justify factory farms, where overcrowding and confinement in filthy quarters often breeds disease, by telling consumers that “indoor housing systems protect food animals from bad weather and predators.”

CFI essentially exists to clean up PR messes for Big Ag. In February, an American animal rights group released an undercover video of an Iowa hog farm showing immobilized pigs in tiny crates caked with feces, workers pushing herniated intestines back inside a piglet, and other pigs being fed the intestines from dead pigs. CFI quickly convened a panel to explain the video showed “normally accepted production practices and nothing that could be considered abusive.”

Indeed, these abusive practices do seem to be standard across the industry; in July, yet another undercover video was released by Mercy for Animals at a hog farm in Minnesota documenting the same tiny “gestation” crates found at the Canadian facility. CFI’s panels try to convince consumers that “standard” practice are the same as “humane” practices.

Rather than put effort into reforming systematic cruelty, Big Ag companies prefer to invest in bending the law to suit them. Five states have passed so-called “ag-gag” laws, which criminalize undercover investigations and secret footage inside these facilities. These laws’ sole purpose is to keep consumers from discovering the conditions in which their food is produced.