The issue of sexual assault on college campuses has captured headlines over the past several months, as students and faculty on several college campuses have filed formal complaints with the U.S. Department of Education alleging that their universities’ administrations have underreported rape cases or mistreated rape victims. In response, a network of campus activists have taken advantage of the current momentum around rape culture to push for change.

Now, on campuses across the country, their work is beginning to have an impact. Change is slow, and there’s no guarantee that university administrations will make an immediate turnaround. But the following institutions are taking small steps in the right direction to ensure that students’ concerns are being heard and sexual crimes are being taken seriously:

University of Montana: After a yearlong federal investigation into the way that UM officials deal with sexual crimes, the university reached a settlement with the Department of Justice and the Department of Education last week. UM agreed to an overhaul of its sexual assault policies, which the administration will implement over the next two years. The federal government is hailing the UM settlement as a success story and hoping it can serve as a model for campuses across the country, although some campus activists are a bit more skeptical that it will bring about dramatic change. But it’s a start. In another encouraging sign for Montana students, the DOJ also reached a settlement with the Missoula Police Department this week, which will officially compel the local police force to stop mistreating survivors of sexual assault.

University of North Carolina: UNC is currently undergoing a federal investigation for mishandling rape cases on campus, and a new campus task force charged with resolving the issue is hoping to look to the University of Montana for guidance as it works to update its own protocol. The university formed a 22-member task force this week to review UNC’s sexual assault policies and look for areas of reform. Since the five women who filed the federal complaint against UNC alleged that the current sexual assault policy was too vague, perhaps partly because it was written by just a handful of select administrators, the task force will include student and faculty representatives.

Stanford University: At the beginning of this month, Stanford announced that the administration will partner with student groups to initiate a campus-wide campaign around issues of sexual assault and rape culture. The student activists who initiated the campaign explained that they hope it will help spark a broader conversation about preventing sexual assaults by teaching students more about consent. “The idea behind it was that there are conversations had about sexual assault on campus but there isn’t always space for discourse just about consent, or having a more positive constructive conversation about consent,” undergrad explained.

University of Notre Dame: Two years ago, the Department of Education investigated Notre Dame’s handling of sexual assault cases and recommended that the administration strengthen its policy for reporting and investigating these types of crimes on campus. Since then, the administration has worked to overhaul its system, and developed a student questionnaire to solicit more feedback about areas it can improve. At the end of last month, the results from that survey revealed that the majority of the student body understood how to navigate the new system for reporting sexual crimes, and 75 percent of students said they believed the administration handled rape cases “effectively and fairly.” Students did indicate that they want university officials to offer more education around consent.

The University of Maryland: This week, administrators at UMD agreed to explore a sexual assault awareness pilot program for all incoming freshmen, the first step toward implementing a proposal to require every incoming student to attend a mandatory workshop on the issue. Under the pilot, about 30 percent of next year’s incoming students would receive information about preventing sexual crimes. And earlier this month, the student senate voted to expand the university’s jurisdiction to address sexual violations — a move that could help ensure that rape victims whose assaults occur off campus can still access administrative resources.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the issue is anywhere close to resolved. Universities still have a long way to go to effectively eliminate the rape culture dynamics that often permeate their student disciplinary systems. A recent national survey conducted by the group Students Active For Ending Rape asked college students to grade their school’s sexual assault policies, and half of the respondents gave them a C or lower. A mere 9.8 percent of students gave their university an A for handling rape cases well.

Cancer patients are much more likely to go bankrupt than Americans who aren’t faced with a cancer diagnosis, a new study finds. Even the Americans who have access to health insurance aren’t necessarily safe from bankruptcy, since the high cost of treating cancer can still put an untenable strain their finances.

A team of researchers in Washington state collected data from nearly 400,000 adults, evenly split between those who had been treated for cancer and those who were cancer-free. After checking to see which of those adults had filed for bankruptcy between 1995 and 2009, the researchers found that cancer patients were 2.5 times as likely to go bankrupt in that period.

Although the study didn’t specifically look at insurance coverage, previous research has demonstrated that the Americans who cite major health issues as the reason they filed for bankruptcy are actually often insured. One 2006 study found that more than 60 percent of bankruptcies in the United States are due to high medical bills, and in those cases, three-quarters of those Americans had insurance when they got sick. NBC News interviewed one cancer patient who found herself in this situation, even though she was employed and insured when she first got her diagnosis:

That rings true for Janet Literski, 57, who had purchased health insurance as an independent contractor working in sales. When she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2008 Literski discovered her insurance covered only part of her surgical costs and none of her diagnostic tests. Then there were co-payments and deductibles. By the time she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer two years later, she was about $150,000 in medical debt.

In 2011, no longer able to work, Literski and her disabled husband filed for bankruptcy. “It was a gut wrenching decision because you feel like a personal failure, and that makes me angry because I had tried to do everything right,” Literski says. “I had health insurance, I was working.”

Literski is now covered by Medicaid and receives disability payments and though she hasn’t been told she’s in remission, she says she is “healthy enough.”

[The study's lead author, Dr. Scott Ramsey,] says cancer centers need to do a better job of assessing each patient’s financial status, offering credit counseling, and managing patient care.

Even bigger disparities emerged when the researchers broke down the cancer patients in their study by different demographics. The younger groups were up to 10 times more likely to go broke than the older patients, and non-white women were the most likely to run out of money.The cancer that is associated with the highest risk of bankruptcy is thyroid cancer — likely because that disease mostly affects younger women. On the other hand, older men with prostate cancer are the least likely to reach financial rock bottom.

Ramsey and his researchers first presented their research in 2011, and their final findings were published in the Health Affairs journal this week. The timing of the study’s release coincides with some recent pressure to help lower the cost of cancer drugs. Last month, a group of over 100 doctors criticized Big Pharma companies for making “life-saving” cancer drugs too expensive for Americans to afford. The doctors asserted that the “unsustainable drug prices” were “causing harm to patients,” and urged reforms in this area to ensure that cancer patients don’t have to go without the treatment they need.

Cancer patients have also been recently caught up in the budget battles resulting from sequestration. At the end of April, cancer clinics blasted Congress for taking legislative action to restore the sequester cuts that were causing airport delays rather than working to address the cuts that are undermining Americans’ chemotherapy treatment. As a result of the automatic budget cuts, some Americans are being forced to delay their chemotherapy, and some cancer clinics may even be forced to close their doors.

This month, West Virginia became the latest state to ban teen sexting. Under the state’s new law, minors are barred from making, having, or distributing material that portrays another minor in an “inappropriate sexual manner.” Those who come in violation of the law will be charged with “an act of delinquency” and, instead of being faced with criminal charges, will be required to enroll in an educational program to learn more about the potential long-term consequences of sexting.

West Virginia law already prohibited adults from sexting with minors — a situation that represents a clear abuse of power, and can fall under child pornography charges. The new measure goes further to restrict this type of sexual activity among peers. “I think it’s long overdue,” one parent told a local NBC affiliate. “I think [sexting] gets our [nation's] kids in a lot of trouble, gets them active in sex way earlier than they should be.”

That attitude is likely mirrored in the other states across the country that have imposed some legislation to address youth sexting. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, at least 20 states have enacted some kind of teen sexting measure. Some legislative pushes in this area have been a response to incidences of cyberbullying, and hope to prevent teens from distributing explicit photos in a way that is intended to cause emotional harm. The anti-sexting laws range from requiring schools to distribute educational materials about the dangers of sexting, to fining high schoolers for being in possession of an explicit photo on their cell phone, to serving teens with a misdemeanor change for texting a sexual image of themselves.

Of course, it’s incredibly important to make teens aware of the long-term consequences of their actions, encourage healthy sexual behavior, and crack down on cyberbullying. But punishing teens for their sexual activity isn’t necessarily the best way to go about accomplishing any of those goals. First of all, despite the media’s consistent hand-wringing over the perils of new technology and the corruption of American youth, sexting is not actually an inherently dangerous sexual activity. It’s not necessarily correlated to other types of more “deviant” behavior, either. And ultimately, sexting bans don’t proactively encourage teens to safeguard their sexual health.

That’s because this type of legislation doesn’t help foster a culture in which teens grow up learning how to respect themselves and others, make responsible choices, and honor their sexual partners’ consent. Instead, anti-sexting laws simply further the pervasive attitude that expressions of teen sexuality are always dangerous and shameful. As the failures of abstinence education programs have already demonstrated, stigmatizing sexual expression isn’t actually an effective way to keep teens safe, since it doesn’t encourage them to practice healthy behavior or feel comfortable enough to ask questions. And, if teachers and principals are empowered to confiscate students’ phones to investigate potential illegal behavior, anti-sexting laws could also create a high school environment where every teen is automatically a suspect.

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Doctors are reluctant to give nurses more authority to treat patients, according to findings in a New England Journal of Medicine study released on Wednesday. But doctors’ skepticism about nurses having expanded roles isn’t based on the facts — and it ignores the reality that nurse practitioners must take on such responsibilities if health care reform is to succeed.

The new study finds that many doctors don’t trust nurses to lead patient-centered “medical homes,” with only 17 percent of surveyed primary care physicians viewing it positively. “Medical homes” are arrangements encouraged by Obamacare in which nurses, doctors, pharmacists, and specialists work together to provide patients with better and more efficient care in a unified setting.

There is also a striking chasm between doctors and nurses on the issue of nurse practitioners’ ability to provide safe, quality patient care:

When researchers asked whether they felt the quality of care provided by physicians in exams and consultations was higher than that provided by nurse practitioners, more than 66 percent of doctors agreed, while 75 percent of nurses disagreed.

Doctors also overwhelmingly disagreed with many nurses’ position that they should receive the same level of pay as doctors for performing similar services.

But this position is an untenable one in the era of Obamacare, with more than 25 million Americans expected to gain health coverage in the coming decade. Since the bulk of these Americans are expected to consume primary care — rather than specialty — services, it’s important that the U.S. medical system have enough medical workers to serve them. And there simply aren’t enough primary care doctors to tackle that burden on their own.

Instead, nurse practitioners will have to take on additional responsibilities. There’s no reason to suspect that this will compromise patient care quality — in fact, multiple studies have shown that the quality of care that nurse practitioners provide for acute primary care is on par with doctors. One randomized trial comparing nurses’ versus doctors’ ability to manage complex care regimens for HIV-positive patients receiving antiretroviral therapy also found no evidence of professional inferiority. As David Hebert, CEO of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, told Kaiser Health News, “[N]urse practitioners have been practicing safely and providing great outcomes for decades.”

Doctors — and patients — would be well served by an expanded role for nurse practitioners. Primary care doctors tend to be concentrated in urban areas, creating a major barrier to rural and isolated communities’ access to basic medical services. But nurses are more numerous and could have greater access to such populations, making them ideal candidates for heading medical homes and seeing to the day-to-day aspects of patient care.

The states home to the United States’ harshest abortion restrictions, North Dakota and Arkansas, are both facing legal challenges over their new laws — and in both states, those battles have begun to advance this week.

In North Dakota, reproductive rights activists filed a lawsuit on Wednesday to challenge a measure that threatens to shut down the last remaining abortion clinic in the state. And in Arkansas, a district judge sided with abortion providers on Wednesday, denying the state’s request to drop the lawsuit against its new 12-week abortion ban and allowing the doctors’ challenge against it to continue.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, a New York-based group that assists with litigation to defend women’s right to legal abortion, is also preparing to file suit against several other new anti-choice laws in North Dakota — including a measure that criminalizes abortions after just six weeks of pregnancy. Taken together, all of the new restrictions that North Dakota enacted this session would make it more difficult for women to terminate their pregnancies there than anywhere else in the country.

“‘With their relentless campaign to end safe and legal abortion in North Dakota, lawmakers have effectively told the women of their state, ‘We don’t care about your health, we don’t care about your safety, and we sure don’t care about your constitutional and human rights,’ ” the group’s president, Nancy Northrup, said in a statement this week. “Our message back to politicians hostile to reproductive rights in North Dakota and nationwide is crystal clear: We are going to fight back relentlessly against your attacks on the women of your state.”

When anti-choice lawmakers in North Dakota and Arkansas enacted the new abortion bans earlier this year, they were fully aware that those laws would spark court battles. In fact, North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple (R) even admitted that he decided to sign an unconstitutional six-week abortion ban exactly because he wanted to entangle his state in a legal fight that could “discover the boundaries of Roe v. Wade.” This session, Republican lawmakers — who used to prefer to indirectly undermine women’s reproductive rights — are now favoring more direct attacks that they hope could eventually land the abortion issue back in the Supreme Court.

Of course, those fights don’t come without a cost. North Dakota’s attorney general has already requested an addition $400,000 dollars to defend its abortion bans in court. If abortion-related lawsuits drag on over several years, as they have in Kansas, costs can top $1 million dollars.

This week, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommended that the United States should dramatically lower its legal threshold for the amount of alcohol that drivers may have in their bloodstreams, in an effort to address the nation’s “epidemic” levels of impaired driving. The government-backed board wants to drop the legal limit for drivers’ blood alcohol content (BAC), which is currently set at 0.08, down to 0.05. Board members say that adopting the new 0.05 rate could save about 500 to 800 lives each year.

The proposed change is part of a package of new initiatives that the safety board hopes will help eliminate drunk driving in the U.S., which currently accounts for a third of the county’s annual traffic fatalities. According to NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman, drunk driving has caused more than 440,000 preventable deaths over the past 30 years.

“Our goal is to get to zero deaths because each alcohol-impaired death is preventable,” Hersman explained. “Alcohol-impaired deaths are not accidents, they are crimes. They can and should be prevented. The tools exist. What is needed is the will.” Ultimately, however, the safety board can’t actually enact its own regulations — it needs federal and state agencies, or legislators in Congress, to carry out its recommendations.

More than 100 countries around the world have already adopted laws that forbid an alcohol content of more than 0.05. And according to the NTSB, many of those countries saw a significant drop in their traffic deaths after lowering those thresholds. Nevertheless, it likely won’t be easy to get the necessary support to enact this particular proposal in the United States. A 0.05 rate would outlaw driving after moderate drinking — about one drink for a woman who weighs less than 120 pounds, and two for a 160-pound man — which is already leading to concerns over a so-called “one drink DUI.” The NTSB is certainly anticipating strong resistance from states.

“It was very difficult to get .08 in most states, so lowering it again won’t be popular,” Jonathan Adkins, an official with an organization representing state highway safety offices, told the Associated Press. In fact, it took nearly a quarter of a century to bring the current drunk driving standard to where it is today. In the early 1980s, many states had their legal BAC levels set at 0.15 — and only after 24 years of lobbying, largely spearheaded by the advocacy group Mothers Against Drunk Driving, did every single state finally drop down to 0.08.

That’s partly because there are powerful industry giants standing in opposition to a lower BAC level. The NTSB’s recommendation was harshly criticized by the American Beverage Institute, an association representing thousands of restaurants, who called the idea “ludicrious.” According to a spokesperson for the trade group, “moving from 0.08 to 0.05 would criminalize perfectly responsible behavior” while doing nothing to stop “hard-core drunk drivers from getting behind the wheel.”

This isn’t the first time that business interests have conflicted with proposed measures to safeguard Americans’ health. The restaurant and fast food industries have also stood in opposition to other public health proposals, like limiting smoking in public establishments and placing regulations on the portion sizes for unhealthy food.

The NTSB chose to announce their new recommendations on the 25th anniversary of one of the United States’ deadliest traffic accidents. On May 14, 1988, an intoxicated man drove on the wrong side of a Kentucky highway and crashed into a bus, killing 27 people and injuring more than 30. Twenty four of the victims were children riding on the bus — members of a church youth group returning from a day trip to an amusement park.

A half-decade of budget cuts has left Massachusetts’ public health department so understaffed that it cannot keep pace with a massive backlog of safety inspections for public facilities and investigations into Americans’ complaints about medical mismanagement and malpractice. State public health officials are now begging lawmakers for more funding in order to prevent another public health disaster like last year’s deadly meningitis outbreak, which stemmed from unclean conditions at an uninspected Massachusetts pharmaceutical mixing plant.

The Boston Globe reports that the budget cuts are so steep that there is now a five-month waiting period for investigating consumer complaints at Massachusetts nursing homes, clinics, and hospitals — including for sexual abuse and medical malpractice complaints. Other facilities such as summer camps, biotechnology firms, and food plants are simply bypassing routine inspections due to the dearth of state inspectors.

Funds were appropriated for surprise inspections of pharmaceutical facilities like the one at the root of last December’s meningitis outbreak — but only temporarily. That has public health officials and Gov. Deval Patrick’s (D) administration worried that the Commonwealth is unprepared for another outbreak barring more funds, since the surprise inspections found rust and mold at many such facilities. The state legislature has only appropriated a portion of the funds so far:

“The department has done a herculean task at doing the best it absolutely can with the resources that have understandably been short over the past half decade,” Dr. Lauren Smith said in an interview last week, her last as interim public health commissioner.

Over the past four years, the bureau responsible for health care safety has seen its budget reduced by about $4.7 million, a 26 percent cut when adjusted for inflation, according to an analysis by the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center.

Smith said the department needs to make the case for more funding “before there is any adverse outcome for any particular patient.” [...]

The House included the pharmacy money in its budget, but not money for the additional inspectors the administration sought.

But even if funds for additional pharmaceutical inspectors are restored in the legislature’s budget, they still won’t be enough to address the logjam of medical complaints. That’s a major problem, since the existing backlog “means that inspectors performing routine reviews often are unaware of the pending issues,” and cannot incorporate them into their investigations.

Seeing as Patrick has been governor since 2007, he had to have signed off — and even advocated — every budget that cut funding for the public health department and led to the current resource shortage. That underscores the unfortunate reality that, while conservatives are often scrutinized for undermining health initiatives, Democratic leaders are also tempted to balance their budgets at the expense of important public health programs.

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has paired his support of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion with big cuts to local counties’ funding that critics say could cripple important community medical resources. In Massachusetts, Patrick himself has fought to shutter state mental health hospitals, arguing that there are already “too many hospital beds” in the state and that patients can simply pack up and go to other mental care facilities — even though such hospitals tend to be dispersed across long distances.

A Senate Republican has seized on the growing controversy surround the IRS scandal to introduce a bill that would effectively repeal a huge chunk of the Affordable Care Act and significantly increase health care costs for millions of Americans.

Sen. Dean Heller’s (R-NV) “IRS Accountability Act” would prohibit “the IRS from receiving any ObamaCare funding that would otherwise be used for implementing the massive healthcare law,” preventing the agency from enforcing the law’s individual health care mandate, determining eligibility for affordability credits, and collecting taxes to help pay for the coverage expansion.

“Nevadans are already concerned about ObamaCare, so the fact that Congress could hand over even more power to an agency under intense scrutiny to enforce the health care law is deeply concerning,” Heller said in a statement. “The ‘IRS Accountability Act’ suspends funding for new ObamaCare IRS agents because right now we can’t trust the IRS to do its job.”

By 2014, the health care law will require the agency to assess fines on individuals who can afford to purchase health care coverage, but choose not to, and distribute tax subsidies for families who make no more than four times above the federal poverty line, approximately $94,200 for a family of four. Should Heller’s bill become law, the government wouldn’t be able to collect the penalties or pay out subsidies. It would also struggle to capture revenues from fees on medical devises, health care insurers and high-cost plans.

The penalty for going uninsured — which will be gradually phased in from 2014 to 2016 and then increase annually by the cost-of-living adjustment — is designed to encourage young and healthy people to buy coverage and spread the cost and risk of coverage across a wider population, thus lowering premiums. Though it’s unclear how many fewer people would purchase insurance if they were not penalized for not doing so, a 2012 study from the Urban Institute indicated that without a mandate, “nongroup premiums overall would increase by roughly 10 percent with high exchange participation and by 25 percent with low participation.”

Heller’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

After a big win in the Supreme Court on Monday, biotech firm Monsanto Company has more or less solidified its control of the American food supply. Monsanto’s patented genetically modified (GM) seeds comprise roughly 90 percent of the U.S. seed market, driving conventional seeds to near extinction. Now, the company has set its sights on the rest of the world.

A report released Monday from Food and Water Watch details how the State Department has bolstered the biotech industry in its quest to dominate the global seed market. The report found that in 926 diplomatic cables between the State Department and embassies, officials pushed embassies to pressure foreign lawmakers to accept American seeds and intervene in “problematic legislation” banning or restricting GM crops. Even after Monsanto was caught violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and bribing an Indonesian official, U.S. diplomats continued to aggressively promote the company’s interests.

Cables show that embassies in South Africa, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Vietnam lobbied against GMO labeling initiatives, while the embassy in Spain asked for “high-level U.S. government intervention” to combat GM opposition at the “urgent request” of Monsanto. Other outposts regularly worked to kill laws meant to give native farmers a fighting chance against the biotech industry’s rapid takeover of the international seed market:

In 2008, the State Department joined Polish livestock and grain interests and the American Soybean Association to defeat a proposed ban on GE livestock feed. The embassy in Poland promoted pro-biotech rules and legislation but recognized that “we need to take care to be seen as protecting choice, not pushing use.” In 2007, the State Department and the USDA worked with Turkish biotech proponents to defeat proposed legislation that threatened over $1 billion in U.S. GE crop exports. In 2005, the USDA launched a lobbying and public relations campaign to successfully derail proposed anti-biotech legislation in Nicaragua. The embassy in Thailand lobbied to lift the ban on biotech papaya field trials in 2006. The embassy in Egypt tried to break “the regulatory logjam” that was stalling the approval of new GE crops. In Europe, the State Department has targeted the EU to weaken the regulatory safeguards that have delayed the approval of GE crops and to force the EU to accept biotech imports.

Though foreign leaders remain suspicious of these biotech corporations, the media has enthusiastically billed GM seeds as the solution to the global food crisis with little basis. An analysis of articles touting this claim found that virtually none of them identified specific technologies or crops that would help, preferring to make general calls for greater agricultural productivity. Meanwhile, the influential International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development advised that developing nations avoid GM seeds because of their high costs, uncertain yields, and threat to local agriculture. GM seeds, which initially promised greater yields and lower herbicide levels, have actually lowered yields in the U.S. while forcing farmers to apply heavier doses of herbicides to combat “superweeds” that evolved to overcome Monsanto’s gene.

What’s more, several strains of non-GM drought-resistant seeds in India and Africa have actually increased yields and are spreading rapidly. These accomplishments of conventional seed-breeding went largely ignored by the media.

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For the 37th time since 2011, House Republicans will hold a vote to repeal Obamacare on Thursday, bringing the total cost of all of their failed repeal votes to roughly $55 million in taxpayer money, according to one estimate.

Last year, CBS News calculated that the number of hours spent on 33 repeal votes — then roughly 80 hours, or two full work weeks — cost taxpayers an estimated $48 million. Since then, Republicans have held three more votes (another $4.5 million) and will add another $1.5 million with their latest.

At a time when lawmakers have implemented $85 billion in across-the-board cuts on top of $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade, no dollar can be spared. And the country has serious health-related needs that could use funding. Here are some better health care uses for the more than $50 million these symbolic votes against the Affordable Care Act have wasted:

1. Restore cuts from sequestration to Title X family planning programs and Title V maternal and child health services. The National Women’s Law Center calculates that a 5 percent cut to the budgets of each program will reduce them by $15 million and $32.5 million, respectively. Rather than voting to repeal a bill that expands women’s access to preventative services, the House could use the money to expand them.

2. Double the Department of Justice’s budget for sexual assault services, which has currently been authorized a $50 million budget. The program gives money to states so that they can support rape crisis centers and other nongovernmental organizations that provide direct intervention, core services, and other assistance to the victims of sexual assault. Current funding is inadequate, as some states receive less than $300,000 and many programs lack the resources to meet victims’ needs.

3. Grant a request for $50 million to train 5,000 new mental health professionals as part of a new initiative to expand mental health treatment and prevention services. This proposal came in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting to address gaps in the mental health system.

4. Help states implement paid leave policies. President Obama included a $50 million State Paid Leave Fund in his 2011 budget to provide start-up support for states that want to enact paid leave for workers. More than 40 percent of workers don’t have access to paid sick leave, heading to work when they or their family members experience an illness, but this funding could help give them a better option.

The current Congress is on track to be the most unproductive since the 1940s, but still has time to hold votes that won’t result in actual legislative change. There are many other priorities lawmakers could focus on instead and better ways to spend taxpayer dollars.

During an interview with World Net Daily, former Republican presidential aspirant Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) raised the question: could Obamacare allow the IRS to “deny or delay” conservatives’ access to medical care?

Bachmann’s musings come on the heels of an ongoing IRS scandal centering on the agency’s improper scrutiny of conservative political groups. While right-wing commentators and politicians are already using the incident to smear the health law by raising questions about IRS access to Americans’ private medical data, Bachmann took things one step further:

Since the IRS also is the chief enforcer of Obamacare requirements, [Bachmann] asked whether the IRS’s admission means it “will deny or delay access to health care” for conservatives.

At this point, she said, that “is a reasonable question to ask.” […]

[S]hould Americans fear their government may try to harm them if they are conservative?

“It now is an entirely reasonable question for the American people to ask,” she said. “Will Obamacare be so politicized and misused?”

The IRS has been processing information about Americans’ health care for decades, since approximately 160 million Americans write off their tax-deductible employer-provided health benefits each year. There has been no evidence of any kind of privacy impropriety in all of that time.

Under Obamacare, the IRS will be responsible for determining whether or not Americans have insurance so that it can use household income data to provide consumers with government subsidies to buy health coverage. The agency will not determine if, when, or what benefits are provided to Americans.

This isn’t the first time Bachmann has made outlandish comments about Obamacare or health care in general. The congresswoman has previously asserted that Obamacare will “literally” kill people and propagated debunked conspiracy theories claiming that the HPV vaccine causes young girls to become “sexually promiscuous.”

North Carolina is advancing a measure that would effectively allow personal beliefs to trump women’s access to birth control. Under HB 730, employers in the state could decide not to include contraceptives in their workers’ insurance plans for any reason — a direct violation of the popular Obamacare provision that stipulates women should receive birth control coverage at no additional cost to them. But as lawmakers debate HB 730, women’s health advocates in the state want them to know they’re not willing to be dragged back to the 1960s without a fight.

“We love a good vintage look — but not when it’s running the state legislature,” the local Planned Parenthood affiliate explained in a press release. That’s why Planned Parenthood supporters dressed up in 1960s clothing to attend a House committee hearing about HB 730 on Wednesday.

The 1960s apparel is intended to communicate that state lawmakers are trying to turn back the clock to past decades, when women didn’t have the freedom to control their own reproductive decisions. Planned Parenthood raised awareness about HB 703 with a Mad Men-themed event in advance of the committee hearing, and then sent dozens of vintage-garbed supporters to Wednesday’s debate (all photos courtesy of Planned Parenthood Action Fund of Central North Carolina):

“We like watching Mad Men — but we don’t want to live in it,” Paige Johnson, the president of public affairs for the Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina, pointed out. “Women’s preventive care — including birth control — is basic health care. Politicians and bosses have no business denying women access to this basic health care. This shouldn’t be a revolutionary idea, but unfortunately it is to some.”

North Carolina lawmakers aren’t the only ones to consider a foray into 1960s-esque policies. Even though a similar law in Missouri allowing employers to deny birth control coverage was recently struck down by a federal judge, that hasn’t stopped other states from attempting the same method to restrict women’s access to affordable birth control.

And unfortunately for the women in North Carolina, this is hardly the only measure currently being considered in the legislature that could pose a threat to women’s health. State lawmakers are also considering including biased misinformation about abortion in sex ed classes, imposing unnecessary restrictions on abortion clinics that could force them to close, and forcing teens to get a notarized note from their parents before getting tested or treated for STDs.

Faith leaders were an important group pushing red state leaders to accept Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. And with open enrollment for Medicaid and the law’s insurance marketplaces inching closer, they’ll be crucial to making sure that Americans know how, where, and when to sign up.

To that end, Maryland officials are currently holding a summit with over 150 faith leaders in which they explain the nuances of the law — and urge religious leaders to distribute that information by educating their congregants and communities. Faith leaders are enthusiastic about the plan, since their day-to-day dealings with their communities gives them a unique perspective on Americans’ needs and struggles:

The Rev. Janet Craswell, of the Salem United Methodist Church in Brookeville, described the summit as very helpful. Although her church is in a small Maryland community, Craswell said she has been hearing from a wide variety of people who will be impacted by the overhaul, including families with unemployed and uninsured young adults, people with disabilities and small business owners who are confused and concerned about how the law will impact their businesses.

“We see people every day,” Craswell said. “I mean, we are dealing with people week to week, and we’re also dealing with people at the point of crisis where they’re in hospitals and in hospice and they’re having to deal with major life issues.”

In fact, coordinating Obamacare enrollment efforts with faith leaders could be great news for another population that has largely been ignored in all the hubbub and politics of the expansion: Americans who already qualify for the program, but have never enrolled. In a 2006 report, the Commonwealth Fund estimated that 62 percent of Medicaid or CHIP-eligible children were not enrolled in either program, and 66 percent of Medicaid-eligible low-income parents were not enrolled.

Much of that discrepancy has to do with underwhelming state outreach efforts stemming from a lack of adequate funding, as well as the reality that many Medicaid-eligible populations simply don’t know they have the resource available to them. “Even in states that have more of a commitment to bringing new populations in, they don’t have the budget to do outreach and take out ads,” said Melinda Dutton, a partner at a health consulting firm assisting states with Obamacare implementation, in an interview with American Medical News.

But with the renewed national push for Medicaid enrollment ramping up this year, some health advocates hope that these previously unenrolled Americans will get swept up in the effort and “come out of the woodwork.” That’s where faith leaders are crucial to the undertaking, since they have greater access to the rural or isolated communities that Medicaid may have overlooked.

For example, the homeless — or those on the cusp of entering transitional housing programs — often do not enroll in Medicaid due to barriers such as a lack of proper identification or a Social Security card. These populations also tend to distrust government institutions — but faith leaders and community organizations could help walk them through the process in a way that the government can’t, helping secure their medical stability. And with over 25 million Americans expected to gain coverage under Obamacare in the coming decade, state, federal, and public health officials will need all the help that they can get.

Last week, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) promised to schedule the first full Obamacare repeal vote for this legislative session. That vote, which will likely come on Thursday, will give freshman Republicans in the 113th Congress the opportunity to cast their own purely symbolic vote against health care reform. It will also mark the 37th time that the GOP-controlled House has voted to get rid of the health law.

And, as the New York Times points out, House Republicans’ obsession with repealing Obamacare becomes even more apparent when the amount of time they’ve devoted to that issue is calculated as a percentage of the total time they’ve spent on the floor:

The repeal vote, which is likely to occur Thursday, will be at least the 43rd day since Republicans took over the House that they have devoted time to voting on the issue.

To put that in perspective, they have held votes on only 281 days since taking power in January 2011. (The House and Senate have pretty light legislative loads these days, typically voting only three or four days a week.)

That means that since 2011, Republicans have spent no less than 15 percent of their time on the House floor on repeal in some way. [...]

Michael Steel, [Speaker John Boehner's spokesman], said that spending 15 percent of their time on the issue was hardly a waste for Republicans. “Given that the bill amounts to a takeover of roughly 15 percent of the American economy,” he said, “that sounds about right.”

By some earlier estimations, Republicans in the 112th Congress wasted about 90 hours and $50 million dollars on their multiple failed efforts to get rid of the health reform law. This new Congress is shaping up to be no different. Even though Republicans have admitted they have lost on Obamacare, and are even acknowledging that their future repeal efforts will fail, they have continued to block legislative efforts to amend the health reform law in favor of stubbornly opposing it altogether.

The House conservatives who are focused on pushing the leadership further to the right have been particularly intent on scheduling a full Obamacare repeal vote this session. “It’s something that we wanted to move up on the list of priorities,” Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) told the New York Times. “And I’m glad they listened to us.”

Successfully repealing Obamacare would put more than 30 million Americans’ health coverage at risk, as well as increase the national deficit by billions. It would also ignore the opinion of the majority of the American public, who think that implementing Obamacare should be a top priority in their state. At this point, now that the bulk of the health law has already gone into place, most Americans aren’t interested in defunding it or repealing it altogether — they would rather tweak it to make it better.

On Wednesday morning, Fox News seized on the developing story about the IRS improperly targeting conservative groups applying for tax exempt status to argue that the agency may be unable to implement key aspects of the Affordable Care Act.

Fox Business’ Stuart Varney joined host Martha MacCallum to warn viewers that the IRS “will soon be collecting even more of your personal information to decide whether you are eligible for the subsidies allowed under the healthcare program.” Two Republican lawmakers — Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) and Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) — have pledged to stop the agency from hiring additional agents to ensure compliance with the individual health care mandate and weaken its role in implementing the law. “It’s possible the IRS scandal will delay the implementation of Obamacare. That’s where this is heading,” Varney exclaimed:

MACCALLUM: It’s a dangerous and slippery slope when their credibility comes into question. They know what you make. They know what your income is. Now they are supposed to marry that information with whether you are eligible for a healthcare subsidy. And that raises questions because you have got to keep them posted on every change that may lap in our employment picture.

VARNEY: There is more to it than that. Your doctor is going to put on file electronically your entire medical history. And the IRS wants to know about your health insurance. There is no wall between those two areas of information. And bearing in mind what they have done politically there is no assurance they won’t jump that wall and go into your personal medical history. That’s where the lack of trust comes in.

MACCALLUM: We were told you didn’t have to fear anything about your privacy and having your healthcare record online wasn’t an issue. But people have been scanning document for catch words you wonder what they will scan in terms of healthcare and health records. It’s a legitimate question.

Watch it:

In reality, there is no evidence that the impropriety in the IRS office responsible for granting tax-exempt status to social welfare groups has bled over into other parts of the agency.

Sixty percent or approximately 160 million Americans who receive health care coverage from their employers already write-off the cost of their health care benefits through the IRS and have done so without widespread privacy issues. Families who enroll in nongroup policies and itemize their deductions have been deducting a portion of their medical expenses and the self-employed are receiving a deduction from the IRS “when calculating their income tax for the amount paid for health insurance for themselves and their spouse or dependents.”

The Affordable Care Act will increase the IRS’ involvement in health care while strengthening existing privacy protections by expanding the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).

At the beginning of this month, mainstream media outlets began to run dire headlines proclaiming the spread of an aggressive “sex superbug,” quoting a doctor who claimed it could be “worse than AIDS.” The breathless proclamations of an impending public health crisis stemmed from a report — published by the Associated Press, among other outlets — that a rare strain of drug-resistant gonorrhea had been detected in Hawaii. That would have marked the first time that the HO41 strain, which doesn’t respond to the last-resort antibiotic currently used to treat the STD, had been discovered within the United States.

“This might be a lot worse than AIDS in the short run because the bacteria is more aggressive and will affect more people quickly,” Alan Christianson, a doctor of naturopathic medicine, was quoted as saying in response to the initial reports about HO41. That was enough to spark speculation about the disastrous implications of an impending “sex superbug.” But much of the recent reporting has been overblown. Here are the facts you need to know about this gonorrhea threat:

The initial reports about the rare strain of gonorrhea got it wrong. State health officials clarified that the strain of gonorrhea discovered in Hawaii wasn’t actually HO41 at all. It was a different version of the sexually transmitted infection, H11S8, which is resistant to a different kind of antibiotic — and which isn’t as serious of a threat, since it can still be treated with the drug currently used as a last resort against gonorrhea. The Associated Press ended up retracting its initial story.

It’s not actually worse than AIDS. After initial reports of the sex superbug began to circulate, public health officials quickly responded to clarify that it’s not helpful or accurate to compare drug-resistant gonorrhea to the global AIDS pandemic. Gonorrhea patients don’t usually die from the condition, while the rate of death from untreated AIDS is a staggering 98 percent. “I disagree with the general comparison,” Dr. Bruce Hirsch, a physician who treats infectious diseases at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., emphasized.

It was not caused by comprehensive sex education. Earlier this week, a conservative Christian radio host Matt Barber said that liberals in general, and comprehensive sex education specially, caused the new strain of drug-resistant gonorrhea. “By telling children, ‘Don’t do as I say, do as I do’ with comprehensive sex education giving a wink and a nod…hey, it’s a free-for-all,” Barber explained. “Well, we are reaping what we have sewn in this nation.” In fact, comprehensive sex education instruction that includes information about preventing the spread of sexually transmitted infections has been demonstrably successful at equipping American teens with the tools they need to protect their sexual health. The strains of gonorrhea that resist antibiotic treatment were actually caused by a combination of two factors: gonorrhea can mutate fairly quickly, which allows it to evade drug treatment, and we aren’t developing new drugs quickly enough to keep pace.

Drug-resistant gonorrhea is a real public health threat. Despite the fact that the initial story about HO41 was wrong, public health officials are still cautioning Americans that gonorrhea is, in fact, growing resistant to antibiotics — and that’s a real problem. It’s troubling that there’s only one antibiotic left that can effectively treat the infection, especially considering the fact that gonorrhea is the second most common STD in the United States. For months now, the CDC has been recommending “urgent action” to stop the spread of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, particularly by studying and developing new antibiotic treatments. The National Coalition of STD Directors believes it could be a matter of just another year or two before untreatable gonorrhea really does spread throughout the country.

The rise of antibiotic-resistant diseases isn’t limited to STDs. Even outside of gonorrhea, antibiotic resistance is becoming a serious global health threat. At the beginning of this year, public health experts in England began to warn of an impending “antibiotic apocalypse,” a not-so-distant future when even common infections aren’t able to be effectively treated with drugs anymore. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis and whooping cough are beginning to pose a potential threat, and there’s new evidence that the growing number of superbugs in U.S. meat can spread to Americans. Even though major medical organizations have advocated for making the development of new antibiotics an international priority, that research has lagged behind over the past several decades — partly because that type of innovation isn’t as profitable for Big Pharma companies.

Long-term exposure to traffic pollution could be linked to kidney damage, according to a new study.

Scientists looked at the kidney function of 1,100 stroke patients at a hospital in Boston, Mass., half of whom lived within 1 kilometer (about two-thirds of a mile) of a major road and half of whom lived between 1 and 6 k.m. of a major road. They found the patients who lived closest to a road had the worst kidney function, and that the difference between the two groups was comparable to adding four years onto the kidneys of the group who lived closest to traffic pollution.

The study joins a wealth of research linking air pollution to a range of health problems. Long-term exposure to air pollution has been found to increase a person’s risk of heart attack and stroke — a finding that may help explain traffic pollution’s ties to kidney health, as the health of the two organs is often related. In addition to that, women’s exposure to high levels of traffic pollution in the first two months of pregnancy greatly increases the risk of severe birth defects in the unborn child. Traffic pollution has been cited as causing nearly 5,000 deaths per year in the United Kingdom, and in China, where the smog is so bad it often obscures Beijing buildings, air pollution exposure contributes to 1.2 million early deaths per year.

Despite the well-documented negative side effects of air pollution, it continues to be a pervasive problem in the U.S. In its recent State of the Air report, the American Lung Association found more than 40 percent of Americans live in areas where air pollution counts often reach dangerous levels.

And dirty air often disproportionately affects low-income people and minorities. Last year, a report found people living in poor neighborhoods breathe in more toxic particles from air pollution than people in wealthy neighborhoods, and a study of metro Atlanta, Ga. counties found areas with 75 to 100 percent minority populations contained more than twice the amount of pollution sources as areas that were mostly white. That means that low-income and minorities are more subject to the health effects of dirty air, too — in 2011, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, nearly one in four low-income Hispanic or Puerto-Rican children had been diagnosed with asthma, a condition exacerbated by air pollution, compared to about one in 13 middle-class or wealthy white children.

Monday’s news that illegal abortion provider Kermit Gosnell has been convicted of first-degree murder has already inspired a flurry of reactions, including several calls to tighten restrictions on legal abortion clinics across the country. Throughout Gosnell’s high-profile murder trial, anti-choice activists have consistently pushed the message that abortion still lacks proper regulations — despite the hundreds of state-level restrictions that continue to be piled onto this aspect of reproductive health care — in an attempt to portray all abortion procedures as inherently dangerous and barbaric.

And now, abortion opponents are continuing to suggest that Gosnell is not an outlier, criticizing the pro-choice community for failing to implement the policies to prevent other unscrupulous providers from repeating his crimes. “Despite the blood-soaked horror of Gosnell’s clinic, Democrats refuse to loosen their embrace of unrestricted, unregulated, taxpayer-funded abortion on demand,” Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) said on Monday, suggesting that Gosnell’s case reveals that Democrats “worship” abortion.

But in reality, there’s no such thing as taxpayer-funded abortion on demand. Under the Hyde Amendment, federal dollars are not allowed to fund abortion services. In an ironic twist, the lack of federal funding for abortion services is actually a big contributing factor to the issues at the heart of the Gosnell case. And addressing the public funding ban under Hyde is the real policy solution that could prevent other bad actors like Gosnell from preying on vulnerable women.

Blocking public funds from covering abortion makes for a nice talking point for the anti-choice lawmakers who like to decry the immorality of “taxpayer-funded abortion.” But in practice, the Hyde Amendment means that the low-income women on Medicaid are forced to cover the entire cost of abortion out-of-pocket because their health care plan won’t help cover it. That contributes to a vicious cycle of poverty. Low-income women are more likely to lack access to affordable contraceptive and family planning services, and therefore have higher rates of unintended pregnancies and abortions. They’re more likely to struggle to pay for an abortion. And they’re more likely to slip further into poverty if they’re unable to obtain the abortion they wanted to have.

That’s how the Hyde Amendment, as well as the subsequent state-level bans on public funding that have been modeled on the federal law, ensures that reproductive rights are deeply divided by race and class. Despite the fact that Roe v. Wade has been in place for 40 years, each woman’s access to abortion care is largely dependent on her privilege — and the underprivileged women in the U.S. are paying the biggest price.

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