A proposed abortion bill introduced in Arkansas this week would ban all abortion services after a fetal heartbeat is detected — which can occur as early as six weeks, before some women even realize they’re pregnant — and charge doctors who perform abortions after that arbitrary cut-off with a Class D felony, punishable by up to six years in prison and up to a $10,000 fine.

GOP lawmaker Jason Rapert filed the legislation on Monday, and half of Arkansas’ state senators — 18 of the Senate’s 35 total members — have already signed on as co-sponsors. Rapert says he may bring the bill before the Arkansas Senate’s Public Health Committee later this week.

So-called “heartbeat bills” are an attempt to redefine the medical terms of pregnancy, as well as a direct challenge to women’s constitutional rights. Even though medical professionals agree the point of viability typically occurs around 22 or 23 weeks of pregnancy — and Roe v. Wade grants women the right to terminate a pregnancy up until viability — fetal heartbeat measures would narrow the window for obtaining legal abortion services by as much as 17 weeks. This type of legislation is so radical that it often divides the anti-choice community. A similar measure failed in Ohio at the end of last year because abortion opponents couldn’t reach a consensus on it.

Rapert has acknowledged his bill may face legal challenges — particularly since it’s even more stringent than other states’ 20-week abortion bans that are currently being blocked in court. But, as he explained to the Associated Press, he is committed to imposing his own medical definitions on the women in his state. “When there is a heartbeat there, you have a living human being,” he said.

Since Republicans won both chambers of Arkansas’ state legislature in November’s elections, they’ve made it clear that abortion restrictions are high on their agenda — even though Arkansas, which only has one surgical abortion clinic left in the entire state, is already fairly hostile to reproductive rights. Abortion opponents are pressuring GOP lawmakers to push through a slew of new anti-choice legislation, including a 20-week abortion ban and a measure to block health insurance coverage of abortion services.

The growth of the oil and gas industries in North Dakota has brought an economic boom to the state in recent years — job growth in the oil and gas industry has tripled since 2007, and North Dakota’s overall population has increased 44,000 since 2008. But, as the New York Times reports, it’s also placed a massive new burden on the state’s health care system.

The new jobs have predictably led to a surge in North Dakota’s population. Combined with the unusually dangerous nature of the oil and gas industries, the explosion of new residents to North Dakota is straining the state’s hospitals to their limits. Mackenzie County in North Dakota has shouldered much of the burden with its single, one-story, sixty-year-old hospital with one emergency room. In the last three years, the hospital’s average monthly emergency room visits ballooned from 100 per month to 400:

Over all, ambulance calls in the region increased by about 59 percent from 2006 to 2011, according to Thomas R. Nehring, the director of emergency medical services for the North Dakota Health Department. The number of traumatic injuries reported in the oil patch increased 200 percent from 2007 through the first half of last year, he said.

The 12 medical facilities in western North Dakota saw their combined debt rise by 46 percent over the course of the 2011 and 2012 fiscal years, according to Darrold Bertsch, the president of the state’s Rural Health Association.

Hospitals cannot simply refuse to treat people or raise their rates. Expenses at those 12 facilities increased by 15 percent, Mr. Bertsch added, and nine of them experienced operating losses.

According to the Times report, many of the new patients for the state’s health care system are transient workers who don’t have permanent addresses or health insurance coverage. One of the biggest drivers of hospital debt there is patients providing inaccurate contact information, and then disappearing when it comes time to collect. Average paychecks in the energy sector are growing faster than elsewhere, so it’s not clear if this is an income problem or just a failure of the state’s housing infrastructure to keep up with the massive influx of new residents. Ad-hoc housing has sprung up in camps and even in Walmart parking lots across the state to compensate.

Those infrastructure problems have also created second-order problems for North Dakota’s health care. Street signs and addresses are often nowhere to be found, and paramedics can have a difficult time locating patients. The cramped housing has brought its own health problems and pests, and — as can happen when lots of human beings are thrown into close quarters — sexually transmitted diseases are also on the rise.

And the problems accompanying North Dakota’s boom are a microcosm for the oil and gas industries as a whole: Their annual fatality rate between 2003 and 2008 was 29.1 deaths per 100,000 workers — seven times the rate for all U.S. workers. A single well can require 1,500 trips by semi-trucks, tankers and standard pickups to move oil, water, sand and chemicals, and a third of the industries’ fatalities are associated with the massive amounts of motor vehicle activity. On top of that, companies often pay out rewards for low injury rates, which encourages under-reporting of workers’ compensation claims. In North Dakota itself, companies are allowed to compensate injured workers directly, prompting one lawyer to describe the situation to Grist as “the wild fucking west.”

In Mackenzie County and elsewhere, there are attempts to convoke the local government to impose a new 1-cent sales tax to finance a $55 million expansion of the hospital facility. Gov. Jack Dalrymple (R) is moving to bulk up medical training in the state with a new $68 million medical school building at the University of North Dakota, and $6 million expansion of the nursing program. But for now, the small-town practitioners are largely on their own.

Oklahoma Gov. Marry Fallin (R) has refused to accept Obamacare’s optional expansion of the Medicaid program, denying an estimated 130,000 of her low-income constituents access to health care. And the direct impact of the GOP governor’s decision is evident even within her own extended family.

Fallin’s aunt, 85-year-old Dorthea Copeland, runs a free health clinic in Pottawatomie County, an area of Oklahoma that has an 18 percent poverty rate and a 28 percent uninsurance rate. Copeland’s clinic provides care for the Oklahomans who fall into the coverage gap between earning too little to be able to purchase private insurance and earning too much to qualify for Medicaid assistance — the same group of people who stand to gain coverage under Obamacare’s expansion of the public program.

But since Copeland’s niece has refused to raise the Medicaid program’s eligibility level, the clinic is currently overloaded with low-income patients who don’t currently qualify for government assistance. As Oklahoma Watch reports, Copeland’s volunteer staff — who served over 850 patients last year — are now struggling to keep up with the increasing demand for health services:

On any given Thursday evening, about 20 people pitch in. But it’s not quite enough to keep up with rising demand. On this night, five people will be told they’ll need to wait at least a week to see a doctor.

“It’s getting worse all the time,” says Ty Johnson, who shows up every week to handle patient intake. She bustles about the crowded clinic with a clipboard, calling out names and handing out paperwork. “We’re getting more and more people.”

Not everyone makes the cut. To qualify, patients must be Pottawatomie County residents, must have no other form of insurance coverage and must fall below income caps that are considerably lower than those contained in the Obama expansion plan.

“There is just more need than we can handle,” says Stephanie Scrutchins, who determines eligibility.

Under Oklahoma’s current law, families can’t get Medicaid coverage unless they have dependent children and their annual income falls below $6,996 for a family of four — one of the lowest eligibility thresholds in the nation. The health law seeks to expand the program to include families of four earning up to $30,656 each year. But Fallin says it would be too costly to add additional low-income residents to her state’s Medicaid rolls, despite the fact that outside reports estimate expanding Medicaid would actually save Oklahoma nearly $48 million per year.

When Oklahoma Watch asked Copeland what she thought about her niece’s decision to reject the Medicaid expansion, she didn’t comment. “You know, I don’t get into politics,” she said. “I just run my little business here. Hopefully, we’ll do all that we can for the people that come in. Right now I’m looking at all the returns I’ve got for next Thursday night, wondering how in the world we’ll get them done.”

With comprehensive immigration reform in the national spotlight this week, one talking point already being parroted by reform critics is that any overhaul that incorporates a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants will eventually make President Obama’s landmark health care law much more expensive by adding millions of low-income immigrants onto Medicaid rolls or making them eligible for Obamacare’s private insurance subsidies. But don’t buy the hype — having these prospective Americans insured and paying into America’s tax and health care systems will be good for public health, personal health care costs, and — consequently — overall spending on health care entitlements.

The fact is, undocumented immigrants already receive subsidized care under Medicaid — but only for life-saving emergency room procedures. Those treatments are much more expensive than the primary and preventative care services that undocumented immigrants tend not to seek due to a lack of coverage, and forgoing that preventative care leads to a snowball effect in which undocumented immigrants only pursue “sick care” rather than health care, which raises health care costs for everybody by producing a more unhealthy population whose care is actually subsidized by the rest of the country.

Studies have estimated that America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants cost federal and state governments $10.7 billion in annual health care expenditures. While there isn’t an abundance of solid data on how much those costs would be lowered by placing the immigrants onto actual insurance rolls with comprehensive coverage, chances are that it would mirror trends in general health care spending on the insured versus the uninsured. Public safety net hospitals have estimated that states that do not participate in Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion will cost them over $50 billion by 2019, since uninsured and under-insured Americans cannot afford to compensate hospitals for the care they receive — and that shortfall is ultimately shifted onto the American taxpayer. Having these consumers become legal residents would allow them to pay into the system and actually pay for the benefits that they receive.

Immigration reform and a pathway to citizenship would also bode well for Obamacare’s subsidies and future Medicare spending. Bringing undocumented immigrants into the legal tax system would raise about $5 billion in new revenue in just three years — and potions of those revenues would go towards funding immigrants’ Medicare, Social Security, and Obamacare’s insurance subsidies. Furthermore, there is overwhelming evidence that people who receive quality health care and preventative services early on in life enjoy greater health — and therefore lower health care costs — in their twilight years. That’s especially significant considering that the bulk of expensive medical spending occurs in the last years of a person’s life.

At the end of the day, adding more legal immigrants and — eventually — American citizens onto Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare’s insurance subsidies will temporarily expand health care spending. But it also addresses the actual roots of health care inflation — namely, that people do not pursue enough preventative care early on in their lives and thus raise their treatment costs later on, and that many poor and uninsured people cannot compensate doctors and hospitals for the emergency care that they receive. By patching those elements of the social safety net, comprehensive immigration reform would actually lower long-term health care costs in America, and strengthen the social safety net.

A bill recently introduced in the Texas state house aims to reward employers who violate Obamacare, offering subsidies to any company that uses religious objection as an excuse for denying its employees copay-free contraception.

House Bill 649, introduced by state Rep. Jonathan Stickland (R), was apparently inspired by the controversy over craft chain store Hobby Lobby. That store sued to deny its employees contraception coverage, citing its male president’s religious objections. But since Hobby Lobby, and companies like it, will be forced to pay a fine for violating the law, Strickland wants to compensate them with tax breaks:

The tax credit would be limited to the amount of a federal fine that the company pays or the amount of state tax the company owes.

“When a business is being stressed nearly to the point of bankruptcy by punitive federal taxes, of course the state should give them relief,” Stickland said in the news release.[...]

“The Obama administration’s mandate and their threats to bury Hobby Lobby with $1.3 million per day in tax penalties aren’t just unconstitutional, they’re unconscionable,” he said. “It is simply appalling that any business owner should have to choose between violating their religious convictions and watching their business be strangled by the strong arm of Federal mandates and taxation.”

By offering to help compensate these companies, Strickland is accepting a drastic cut in funding to the Texas government. His plan proposes letting organizations like Hobby Lobby off the hook for state taxes up to the amount they owe in federal penalties. Since Hobby Lobby is estimated to owe a fine of $1.3 million a day (more, in a year, than it would be paying in state taxes), Hobby Lobby would get a pass on giving a single cent to the state of Texas.

But more importantly, it’s unlikely that this bill would survive if it went to the courts. Federal law does not simply supersede conflicting state law, it also invalidates state laws that “stand… as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress” — a doctrine known as “obstacle preemption.” Since the entire point of this Texas bill is to thwart a federal law, it would likely run afoul of this obstacle preemption.

When anti-choice lawmakers in Wisconsin imposed unnecessary restrictions on medication-induced abortions, they claimed they wanted to make sure the procedure was safe. But now that women in the state can’t access the abortion pill to terminate a pregnancy within the first trimester, they’re being forced to delay the procedure until they can receive a more invasive surgical abortion — which can actually slightly increase the health risks for some patients, in addition to putting women through the strain of being denied the right to terminate a pregnancy when and where they would prefer to do so.

Of course, surgical abortions are still an extremely safe medical procedure. But in Wisconsin, they require a more involved process than medicine-induced abortions, forcing women to make several trips to a doctor’s office and denying her the opportunity to choose where she would prefer to terminate her pregnancy.

That’s exactly what happened to Samantha, a Milwaukee-based woman withholding her last name to protect her privacy. As the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism reports, the state’s new law prevented Samantha from accessing the RU-486 abortion pill in the privacy of her own home — and ultimately made the experience a more emotionally stressful one than it would have been otherwise:

Samantha later learned that state lawmakers were planning to change the rules for medication abortions, which could make it more difficult to obtain follow-up care.

“That was really scary,” said Samantha, who decided to wait several weeks to have a surgical abortion as she juggled work and school. She was fatigued and depressed. [...]

Samantha said that in addition to a medication abortion being available earlier, the procedure would have afforded more privacy. During her surgical abortion, she said, there were “six other people in the room,” including medical students.

“It was really overwhelming and obviously painful, too,” she said. “I really wish I could have had the privacy of being in my own room and dealing with just the people affected, just me and my partner.”

Nicole Safar, the public policy director for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin, explains that many women do prefer earlier, medication-induced abortions for the privacy they offer. “More than the physical piece, for many women medication abortion is the right choice for her entire self — emotionally, psychologically,” Safar told the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. “Many women would prefer to go through the process at home, with their family. That’s a huge piece of it you can’t really quantify.”

But since the state law took effect in April, Planned Parenthood clinics across the state haven’t been able to offer medication abortions to their patients — which means that countless women like Samantha are being forced to either have a surgical abortion or travel across state lines to obtain the abortion pill. The women’s health organization is suing the state to overturn the law and restore women’s access to medicine-induced first-trimester abortions.

Making the RU-486 pill widely available has been proven to effectively lower the rate of later-term abortions, since it allows women to make their reproductive decisions as soon as possible. Nevertheless, anti-choice lawmakers insist on imposing unnecessary restrictions on medication abortion and the medical professionals who administer it, even at the expense of women’s privacy and emotional well-being.

This past weekend, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) announced he will not seek re-election in 2014, bringing an almost 40 year career in Congress to a close. But as Harkin steps aside, his legacy — particularly his work to champion increased protections for Americans living with disabilities — remains.

Twenty two years ago, President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) into law. Either law would have been considered landmark civil rights legislation on its own merits — taken together, they represented nothing short of a legislative revolution for disabled and special needs Americans. And those bills were made possible by Harkin, who authored and shepherded them to overwhelming bipartisan approval.

Every handicapped spot in a parking lot, each mechanical wheelchair ramp on a public transport vehicle, and any company that employs qualified Americans with a disability, is only made possible because of the ADA. The law’s provisions — which include protections ranging from anti-workplace discrimination, to public transport and public facility accommodations, to telecommunications support for the visually and hearing impaired — have given millions of Americans the means to pursue independent livelihoods. As one disabled American put it, “I have traveled 18,000 miles between Los Angeles and Bakersfield in an externship, and without the ADA and the Department of Transportation’s provisions, I would not have managed to remain independent and commute.” According to one study, the percentage of disabled Americans citing public transport accommodations as a barrier to their commute dropped from 49 percent to 31 percent between 1989 and 2004.

IDEA applied these same principles to disabled children in the public school system, establishing early intervention and special education requirements for all schools in states accepting federal funding under the statute, as all 50 states now do. And although the concept of providing proper educational facilities and services for Americans with disabilities is now considered an obvious obligation of the American safety net, before IDEA and its precursor law — the Education for All Handicapped Children Act — most of the 6 million disabled American children did not have access to an effective public education.

Granted, not all legislative efforts to assist America’s disabled have enjoyed the successes of the ADA and IDEA. Since many of Medicaid’s benefits for disabled Americans are considered “optional,” they are often a target for austerity measures and deficit reduction. And a recent effort to ratify a United Nations treaty based largely on the ADA was defeated by Senate Republicans, despite widespread support and a last minute lobbying effort by former Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole.

But Sen. Harkin deserves an enormous amount of credit for the myriad opportunities and independence that the ADA and IDEA have afforded to disabled and handicapped Americans — the freedom to pursue an education, a career, and to effectively navigate the country, rather than be relegated to an institution or permanent home care. Harkin pushed the bill to an outsized victory despite the protestations of business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who claimed that the law would be a “job killer” and cost entirely too much money for potentially little benefit. As the Iowa senator winds down his career, he can be assured that the legislation he pioneered during his time in office will go down in history.

New Mexico Rep. Cathrynn Brown (R) made headlines this past week when she introduced a bill to charge women who become pregnant from rape with “tampering with evidence” if they choose to have an abortion. Brown has since clarified that House Bill 206 isn’t intended to target victims of sexual assault, and has worked to revise the language of the legislation — but although she wants to ensure rape survivors won’t be prosecuted for getting an abortion, she hasn’t extended the same protections for the doctors who perform those abortions.

As the Democratic Party of New Mexico pointed out in an official statement about HB 206, the revised bill still represents a dangerous step toward criminalizing abortion. “The bill still makes it a crime to ‘facilitate’ an abortion for a woman who wants one,” Scott Forrester, the director of the group, explained. “That means doctors, nurses, or anyone else who works at a health care clinic where this is one of the services provided would still be guilty of a felony.”

Targeting abortion providers is simply an indirect method of limiting women’s reproductive access, and it has been a successful tactic for anti-choice lawmakers across the country. Abortion opponents often subject abortion clinics and providers to burdensome regulations that aren’t placed on other medical professionals — and doctors who break those rules are typically faced with harsh consequences, like losing their medical licenses.

Brown isn’t the first GOP lawmaker to go as far as to suggest that doctors who perform abortions should be subject to criminal charges. But singling out the doctors who work in this field is having serious consequences. Partly due to the obstacles placed in front of the medical professionals who perform abortions, as well as rising levels of anti-abortion harassment, the country currently has a shortage of abortion doctors — particularly in states that are especially hostile to abortion rights, like New Mexico.

Hospitals would need to check the immigration status of uninsured patients under a new bill introduced by an Arizona lawmaker. Rep. Steve Smith’s (R) H.B. 2293 would require hospital staff to “reasonably confirm” patients’ status during check-in or treatment, and immediately report those who do not have the required papers to immigration officials.

Smith claimed it is a hospital’s civic duty to check immigration status:

“I would hope if you witnessed somebody who is not lawfully present in this country taking advantage of, getting, acquiring any benefit or social service or something that they’re not entitled to, or something they’re abusing or neglected, I would hope somebody would pick up the phone and go, ‘Maricopa police, Buckeye police, I think — I’m not sure — but I think this is happening.”’

The Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association has already rejected the attempt to turn hospitals into another front for immigration enforcement: “When does this begin or end?” a spokesman said. “What other industry should be screening their customers for citizenship verification?” The National Coalition for Immigrant Women’s Rights and National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health also called the measure “unconscionable” and legalized “harassment.” With roughly 19 percent of Arizona’s population lacking health insurance, the bill could deter many immigrants and their children from seeking care, as well as burden hospitals.

A new strain of the extremely unpleasant — though usually non-lethal — stomach bug known as the “norovirus” has led to more than 140 outbreaks since September, ABC News reports.

The virus, which has been rampant in other parts of the world for some time now, has now caused significant illness in America. Public health officials are particularly worried about the rapid pace at which the virus proliferates:

In the U.S., it is now accounting for about 60 percent of norovirus outbreaks, according to report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Norovirus — once known as Norwalk virus — is highly contagious and often spreads in places like schools, cruise ships and nursing homes, especially during the winter. [...]

Sometimes mistakenly called stomach flu, the virus causes bouts of vomiting and diarrhea for a few days. [...]

Ian Goodfellow, a prominent researcher at England’s University of Cambridge, calls norovirus ‘the Ferrari of viruses’ for the speed at which it passes through a large group of people.

“It can sweep through an environment very, very quickly. You can be feeling quite fine one minute and within several hours suffer continuous vomiting and diarrhea,” he said.

The virus, which is the root cause behind most U.S. food poisoning cases, is spread through the air as well as direct contact with contaminated surfaces. Luckily, its fatality rate is relatively low.

But the timing of the pathogen’s American debut is rather unfortunate given this year’s rampant flu epidemic, which has already forced some American emergency rooms to turn patients away from their facilities. And since the norovirus and influenza both disproportionately affect children and the elderly, the combination of the two could be a prescription for public health havoc.

Over 50 San Francisco-based restaurant owners are under fire for prioritizing their own profits over their workers’ health care coverage. A city-wide investigation revealed that, after the restaurant industry collected a total of $14 million in worker health care surcharges in 2011, just a third of that money actually went toward providing low-wage workers with insurance.

Under a city-wide requirement, businesses in San Francisco are supposed to set aside some extra money — about $2 dollars an hour for each worker — to help their employees afford their insurance costs. When the rule first went into effect in 2008, some restaurant owners avoided raising the prices on their menu by tacking a surcharge onto the bottom of their bills and explaining to their customers that the fee would help fund workers’ health care.

But according to San Francisco Supervisor David Campos and Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who helped conduct the investigation into the restaurant owners’ practices, those customers were being deceived. “I can’t say all of them, but for some of these restaurants it was a marketing ploy,” Campos said. And that marketing ploy came at the direct expense of their workers, some of whom didn’t have health insurance at all:

In some cases, not only did the surcharge money go back into owners’ pockets, but employees were denied health care altogether, Ammiano and Campos said.

The inconsistencies were caught after the health law was amended in 2011, requiring city audits of the surcharges. Last year, 3,652 restaurants turned in their paperwork to the labor office, which found oddities in the accounting. The documentation was then turned over to the city attorney for a full-fledged investigation. [...]

For Campos, it’s a consumer-trust issue. “These diners thought they were paying for workers’ health care. Instead these owners were gaming the system,” he said.

Low-wage workers like the employees in San Francisco’s restaurant industry typically don’t have access to health insurance — in fact, more than half of low-wage workers at small firms were uninsured in 2010. And workers’ health care costs are continuing to rise while their wages are stagnating, so it’s nearly impossible for them to afford their own insurance on the private market if their employers choose to deny them health coverage.

Obamacare will help address some of these issues in a similar way as San Francisco began doing in 2008. Starting in 2014, the health reform law will help ensure that employers can’t deny their workers health care simply to protect their own profits, and require businesses with more than 50 employees to offer basic health benefits. Nonetheless, profitable members of the restaurant industry like Olive Garden, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s are already using Obamacare as a convenient excuse to keep perpetrating their anti-worker labor practices and avoid giving their workers any benefits.

Amgen Inc. — one of America’s largest biotech and pharmaceutical companies — has had a rough couple of months. In December, the firm was fined $762 million for illegally promoting drugs and defrauding Medicare. And now lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are looking to undo a little-noticed provision that Amgen successfully lobbied for inclusion in the recent “fiscal cliff” deal, a measure that gives special regulatory treatment to one of the company’s most profitable drugs.

The “fiscal cliff” deal included a provision exempting the oral drugs for kidney dialysis patients from being subject to Medicare price controls for two years. That means that drugs in that class, including Amgen’s hugely profitable Sensipar, can be sold to Medicare at higher prices than other dialysis drugs with little oversight — which ends up raising the drug’s cost for the seniors in the program. While the exemption is broad enough to affect drug companies other than Amgen, the New York Times reported this week that Amgen lobbied intensely for the provision, and that supporters like Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have received substantial political donations from Amgen’s employees and lobbying outfits.

As Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT), who introduced the measure to repeal Amgen’s exemption this week, told the LA Times, “Amgen managed to get a $500-million paragraph in the fiscal-cliff bill and virtually no one in Congress was aware of it. It’s a taxpayer ripoff and comes at a really bad time when we’re trying to control healthcare costs. Amgen should not be allowed to turn Medicare into a profit center.”

It’s no mystery why Amgen wanted the exemption so badly — just last year, sales of Sensipar ballooned by 18 percent to $950 million. But the fact that they successfully wedged it into the fiscal cliff compromise is a testament to the firm’s lobbying prowess and the outsized influence of the entire pharmaceutical industry.

Women in abusive relationships often don’t have control over their own reproductive systems because their abusers prevent them from taking birth control, the nation’s leading group of obstetricians and gynecologists warns. The women’s health experts are encouraging doctors to start screening patients for what they call “reproductive coercion” — any situation in which a woman’s partner won’t let her make her own choices about pregnancy.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) has issued new guidelines to help doctors recognize signs of reproductive coercion within an abusive relationship. “Most OB/GYNs are probably unfamiliar with sexual and reproductive coercion as an entity and probably don’t ask about it,” Dr. Eve Espey, one of the experts who helped write the new guidelines, explained to HealthDay.

Abusers often try to get a woman pregnant against her will — not only by forcing her into sex, but also by hiding her birth control pills or putting holes through condoms. Some abusive partners will even go so far as pulling out a woman’s intrauterine device (IUD) or vaginal ring. And if a woman does become pregnant, reproductive coercion can take the form of pressuring her to continue an unwanted pregnancy when she wants to get an abortion, or forcing her to terminate a pregnancy when she wants to have a child. Ultimately, medical experts explain, this form of abuse is another method of controlling women’s bodies:

“What we’re talking about is specific to women and girls’ ability to contracept, to control their reproductive health,” said Jay Silverman, who studies violence against women at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.

“What we’ve found is that many male partners are more actively involved than we would have thought in really blocking women and girls’ ability to do that, as a form of control that’s part of a larger picture of violence against women and girls,” added Silverman, who wasn’t part of the ACOG committee.

One study of the National Domestic Violence Hotline found a fourth of callers had experienced reproductive coercion.

“All the different forms of violence and coercion of women and girls from male partners are based in the entitlement to control their lives, physically and otherwise,” Silverman said. “They also feel entitled to decide whether she’s going to get pregnant or not.”

ACOG’s new guidelines encourage doctors to talk with their patients about reproductive coercion, since some women may not initially recognize it as a form of abuse. In one study in San Francisco-area clinics, reports of reproductive coercion dropped more than 70 percent after patients began receiving more information about it and filling out additional questionnaires about their birth control use. Doctors can also help give women contraceptive options that are harder for their abusers to detect, like IUDs with the removal strings cut out or an extra stash of birth control pills in an unmarked envelope.

As the women’s health experts explained, these coercive tactics are just one piece of the larger issue of sexual abuse and violence against women. But rather than address the roots of intimate partner violence, or secure national funding for domestic abuse prevention programs through the Violence Against Women Act, the anti-choice community has preferred to focus narrowly on coerced abortions — imposing unnecessary abortion restrictions rather than taking real steps to protect women from their abusers.

The verdict is in: Americans don’t just support Obamacare — they consider implementing its central tenets a “top priority” for their state legislatures.

A new Kaiser Family Foundation/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health poll finds that strong majorities of Americans consider implementing Obamacare’s statewide insurance exchanges and Medicaid expansion either a “top” or “important” priority for their state:

Americans increasingly embrace Obamacare as it is implemented. Although public sentiment on the landmark reform law was ambivalent as it was being debated in Congress, Americans have consistently supported its individual provisions, and support for fully repealing the law plunged to an all-time low after the presidential election. And House Republicans can’t find any co-sponsors for their latest Obamacare repeal bills now that the president is beginning his second term.

But GOP governors don’t seem to have gotten the memo. Only four Republican governors have expressed support for expanding their states’ Medicaid programs, while the vast majority — including those representing some of America’s poorest and least-insured states — have refused to participate in the expansion, despite the fact that expanding Medicaid will actually save states billions of dollars. The outlook for the Obamacare insurance exchanges is also grim, with as many as half of U.S. states refusing to set up their own exchanges, deferring instead to the federal government.

On top of slashing state funds for Ohio’s Medicaid program, Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) hasn’t yet committed to Obamacare’s optional Medicaid expansion — even though participating in the expansion would extend health coverage to an estimated 600,000 low-income Ohioans. But the state’s religious and community leaders are hoping the governor might be swayed by their moral argument for health care reform.

Religious and community leaders held a rally on Thursday to call on Kasich to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, emphasizing the importance of ensuring that Ohio’s poorest residents have access to the live-saving health care they need:

More than 1,000 rallied at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland on Thursday night to show their support for expanding Medicaid in Ohio.

The assembly brought together members of religious congregations, community groups and major health care providers to demonstrate community support for expanding Medicaid. [...]

“We believe that opening access to life-saving health insurance to 600,000 Ohioans through the Medicaid program is the right thing to do for Ohio’s people, for our economy and for our state’s fiscal health,” said the Rev. Tracey Lind, co-chairman of the GCC group from Trinity Cathedral which attended the assembly. The GCC includes more than 20,000 members of 40 churches, synagogues and mosques that are working for passage of Medicaid expansion.

In addition to faith leaders, the Ohio Hospital Association also voiced its support for Medicaid expansion on Thursday, explaining that extending public insurance coverage to low-income people will also help create jobs in the state’s critical health care sector. “Seven of Ohio’s top 12 employers are hospital systems,” Mike Abrams, the president and CEO of the association, said.

And, since the federal government will fund the first several years of the Medicaid expansion, reports have estimated that Ohio will actually result in $1.43 billion in net fiscal savings in the state budget over the next eight years — while failing to expand Medicaid would actually cost the state $8 billion in additional health care costs. “We think it’s a no-brainer,” said Rev. Tracey Lind Dean of Cleveland’s Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. “We believe that it’s going to help people in the state of Ohio be healthier and it’s going to be a revenue source for the state, and we know that with every health care dollar spent that there are more dollars generated in the economy.”

Faith leaders in other Republican-controlled states that have refused to expand Medicaid, like Texas, have also attempted to pressure lawmakers to embrace health care reform. But over a dozen GOP governors are still refusing to cooperate with Obamacare, even to extend health coverage to more of their state’s neediest residents.

During a wide-ranging hearing on the status of America’s mental health system before a Senate health committee on Thursday, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) declared his intention to introduce the Mental Health In Schools Act to address issues of mental illnesses among America’s youth. Thursday’s event was the first Senate hearing on mental health care in six years, as the U.S. is currently engaged in a renewed national conversation on gun safety and mental health issues after last month’s tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Franken explained that his legislation would “allow schools to collaborate with mental health providers, law enforcement, and other community-based organizations to provide expanded access to mental health care for their students” and “support schools in training staff and volunteers to spot warning signs in kids and to refer them to the appropriate services.”

While emphasizing that he didn’t want to inaccurately stigmatize most Americans with mental illnesses as being predisposed to violence, the senator questioned the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Thomas Insel, about the correlation between untreated mental problems in American youth and subsequent violent behavior:

FRANKEN: If mental health issues go untreated, does that increase the chance that someone within a subset, a certain subset of a type of mental illness, will become more violent, Dr. Insel, or will be higher chance that they might become violent?

INSEL: So, Sen. Franken, within that narrow band of the people we’re talking about — which is a small, small segment of the population of people with a mental illness — but those, for instance, who have what we call ‘first episode psychosis’ — we know that the duration of untreated psychosis is related, in fact, to the risk for having a violent act. That’s been studied quite carefully and there’s a real correlation there, so closing that gap is one of the things we can do to increase safety.

FRANKEN: So since, in a sense since Newtown did prompt this, in that very narrow — and that was one of a number of horrific occurrences where I think that no one would question that in Tucson, in Newtown, that we’re talking about someone who’s deranged — that had that person been diagnosed, say, in school and had been able to get some kind of treatment, that there is some kind of connection between making sure that we’re identifying and treating children early on with the tragedy that brought us here?

INSEL: …The published data are quite clear. The difference between severely violent acts like homicide between those who are untreated and those who are treated is fifteen fold. So you drop the risk fifteen fold with treatment. So it’s vital – it’s absolutely vital – that we detect earlier and intervene earlier with something that’s effective.

While the public education system serves as American children’s primary resource for accessing mental health care, only one in five American children in need of treatment actually receives it. This is particularly problematic considering that half of all lifetime mental disorder cases set in by the age of 14.

But if the last several weeks are any indication, lawmakers seem to have woken up to the fact that the current trend is unsustainable. Franken’s proposal for expanding the public school system’s mental health safety net would work in conjunction with President Obama’s Project AWARE initiative to provide similar support and training to schools and other community-based organizations.

The U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSHA) has just released its annual report on drug use and mental health disorders in America, and its findings confirm: Americans cannot afford the cost of their mental health treatment — even if they have insurance.

The report estimates that 45.6 million American adults suffered from Any Mental Illness (AMI) in 2011, comprising 19.6 percent of the adult population. Of that 45.6 million, a meager 38.2 percent received any sort of mental health services — and this graph breaks down why:

While 15 percent of Americans suffering from AMI cited inadequate insurance coverage as their main obstacle to seeking care, a staggering 50 percent said that mental treatment costs are simply too high. And that number includes both insured and uninsured Americans, illustrating how expensive out-of-pocket costs for mental health care are relative to the available coverage.

The data also highlights the damage done by the cultural stigma associated with such care. Over 37 percent of Americans who should have received treatment didn’t believe that they needed any or that treatment wouldn’t help — a dangerous assumption that is likely to exacerbate mental illness — and an additional 35 percent were afraid of negative social consequences or being institutionalized.

That last statistic should weigh heavily on lawmakers’ minds as they craft comprehensive gun safety legislation that also addresses mental health services. Mental health professionals have already expressed concerns that New York’s sweeping new gun laws may end up reinforcing stigmas about mental health care and dissuade Americans from seeking the care they need.

England’s chief medical officer is warning that the rising numbers of drug-resistant diseases will eventually lead to an “antibiotic apocalypse” — a not-too-distant future when there aren’t any cures for common infections — and more antibiotic research should be a top global health priority.

Professor Dame Sally Davies told members of Parliament on Wednesday that the world must begin addressing antibiotic resistance, since the treatments for common diseases like gonorrhea, E. coli, and penicillin are losing their effectiveness and new drugs aren’t being developed quickly enough to replace them. The emergence of “superbugs” that can’t be cured with modern medicine could soon undermine advances in disease research and treatment. Davies compared the issue of resistant viruses to the gravity of the world’s climate change crisis:

Davies said rapidly evolving resistance to antibiotics among bacteria is one of the greatest threats to modern health. “Antibiotics are losing their effectiveness at a rate that is both alarming and irreversible – similar to global warming,” she said. “Bacteria are adapting and finding ways to survive the effects of antibiotics, ultimately becoming resistant so they no longer work.”

The warning comes six months after a similar call by Margaret Chan, head of the World Health Organisation, who said the world faced the “end of modern medicine as we know it” as a result of the “global crisis in antibiotics”.

Davies said that even though she may not live to experience the full effects of global warming, the looming antibiotic crisis may threaten the health care system within the next few decades. “The apocalyptic scenario is that when I need a new hip in 20 years, I’ll die from a routine infection because we’ve run out of antibiotics,” she explained.

Antibiotic development has slowed in recent years, largely because marketing new drugs isn’t as profitable for the pharmaceutical industry. As Davies put it, there’s currently a “broken market model for making new antibiotics” that has led to “an empty pipeline.” The World Health Organization has called for the development of new antibiotic drugs, just four of the world’s 12 largest pharmaceutical companies are investing in researching new antibiotics.