A top Republican senator is comparing Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ ongoing effort to implement the Affordable Care Act in partnership with the health care industry and nonprofit organizations to the Iran-Contra scandal, during which officials secretly sold arms to Iran to fund a resistance movement in Nicaragua.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) made the comments on Saturday, after the Washington Post reported that Sebelius is asking industry groups and other community organizations to support efforts encouraging people to enroll in the new health care exchanges established under the health care law.

Alexander said Sebelius’ actions should “cease immediately and should be fully investigated by Congress.” He cited a report by the Iran-Contra Congressional Joint Select Committee, which says “Congress’s exclusive control over the expenditure of funds cannot legally be evaded through the use of gifts or donations to the executive branch.” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) agreed, telling the Post, “I will be seeking more information from the Administration about these actions to help better understand whether there are conflicts of interest and if it violated federal law.”

Administration officials insist, however, that Sebelius was following authority laid out in the Public Health Service Act and “has made no fundraising requests to entities regulated by HHS.” “For the last several months the Secretary has been working with a full range of stakeholders who share in the mission of getting Americans the help they need and deserve,” Jason Young, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, told ThinkProgress.

He explained that Sebelius is operating under a special section of the Public Health Service Act that allows the secretary to “support by grant or contract (and to encourage others to support) private nonprofit entities working in health information and health promotion, preventive health services, and education in the appropriate use of health care.”

Indeed, officials from Republican administrations appear to have relied on similar authority to promote health initiatives, suggesting that the GOP’s attacks may be motivated by politics rather than preventing wrongdoing.

Shortly after President George W. Bush’s Medicare Part D reforms went into effect in January of 2006, Mark McClellan, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), told the House Ways and Means Committee that the Bush administration “began reaching out to develop partnerships” with industry and community groups since 2004, “held training sessions around the country to education our partners” and ran “print, radio and television advertisements” to “raise awareness and assist beneficiaries and their care givers in making decisions about prescription drugs.”
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On Thursday, Wrigley announced that it would be pulling its controversial new “Alert Energy” gum — each stick of which contains as much caffeine as half a cup of coffee — from the market out of “respect” for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as the agency investigates the public health risks associated with pumping caffeine into everyday foods and drink. With energy products and other potentially harmful foods high in sugar, salt, and fat increasingly under public scrutiny, it’s worth asking: why can’t the FDA do more to crack down on these additives? And why does it take so long to get food makers to comply with regulations when they do?

Answering that requires a brief foray into the history of the American food safety regimen. 1958 was a seminal year for food oversight, seeing the passage of the Food Additives Amendment to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and the creation of the Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) List. Under the Food Additives Amendment, “any substance intentionally added to food is a food additive and is subject to pre-market approval by FDA unless the use of the substance is generally recognized as safe (GRAS).” So if a substance is on the GRAS exemption list, then food makers can use it to their heart’s content without proving its safety, unless specifically prevented from doing so by an FDA regulation.

The GRAS list contains over 700 items, many which have been there since 1958 — and taking an item off the GRAS list once it’s on is difficult. GRAS items are specifically defined as substances that are “generally recognized, among qualified experts, as having been adequately shown to be safe under the conditions of [their] intended use.” Consequently, revoking a substance’s GRAS designation requires considerable expert consensus that an item is not safe for its intended use.

One might ask how salts, sugars, trans fats, and caffeine don’t fit that bill considering widespread evidence that those substances increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, obesity, hypertension, and diabetes, thereby harming public wellness and increasing U.S. health care costs. In fact, government watchdogs and medical groups such as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the American Medical Association (AMA) have issued several calls for the FDA to crack down on those very ingredients.

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The jury considering the fate of Kermit Gosnell — a Philadelphia-area abortion doctor accused of preying on vulnerable women and killing live babies in his illegal, unsanitary clinic — entered its ninth day of deliberations on Friday. Throughout the ongoing murder trial, abortion opponents have attempted to leverage the emotional outrage surrounding the case to draw a comparison between Gosnell’s crimes and legal abortion services, with the hopes of ultimately seizing the opportunity to further restrict reproductive rights.

According to Gallup, however, the current right-wing hysteria over Gosnell hasn’t succeeded in shifting public opinion about abortion rights. When the polling group conducted a survey at the beginning of this month, it found that the percentage of Americans who report they support legal abortion services at least in certain cases has remained steady:

In fact, the nation’s current views on abortion rights reflect the same breakdown of public opinion that has remained relatively constant over the past decade. Gallup points out that could be because relatively few Americans are actually paying attention to the Gosnell trial — something that the right-wing media has blamed on a perceived pro-choice bias in the mainstream media, despite the fact that Gosnell has been widely covered over the past several months.

There is broad consensus on both sides of the aisle that Gosnell’s alleged crimes are barbaric acts that deserve serious punishment. But many women’s health advocates have pointed out that most of the ongoing public conversation around the Gosnell trial has largely been off-base. Rather than providing compelling evidence that abortion is an inherently dangerous practice that needs additional regulations, as the anti-choice community claims, Gosnell’s case actually reveals what happens when women don’t have access to safe and affordable abortion care.

For the first time in decades, U.S. prescription drug spending dropped last year — a phenomenon largely stemming from the fact that, faced with spiraling health costs, Americans are being forced to cut back on their care wherever they can.

According to a new report from IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, the nation’s total spending on prescription medications dropped from $329.2 billion in 2011 to $325.8 billion last year. Similarly, the average amount that each American spent on their medications in 2012 fell to $898, representing a decline of $33. This is the first time the IMS has recorded a drop in drug spending in the 58 years that the institute has been monitoring the data.

Part of the decline is due to more cheaper, generics drugs entering the market, a positive trend that helps Americans better afford their medication and ultimately lowers health costs. But that’s not the whole story. According to the IMS’ director of research, Michael Kleinrock, many Americans are skipping out on their prescriptions because they’re struggling to afford all of their medical costs, and are therefore being forced to ration their health care:

IMS found affordability of health care remains a big problem for many Americans, with growing out-of-pocket costs forcing people to go without needed doctor visits, medicines and other treatments.

For some, that was because they lost jobs or homes during the worst recession in decades. But higher costs also are hitting many employed people who have health insurance.

Employers have been raising health costs for their workers well above the inflation rate, through higher copayments, premiums and deductibles. Many commercial insurance plans now have annual deductibles — the amount a patient must pay before insurance kicks in — that exceed $1,000, Kleinrock said. [...]

“Even patients with insurance are feeling the pinch and have been reducing their use of health care,” Kleinrock said.

IMS’ findings are consistent with other studies that have found that low-income Americans are forgoing their medication because they can’t afford it. One out of every five Americans has asked their doctor to prescribe a cheaper medication in order to lower their prescription costs — and, compared to wealthier people, poorer patients are more than twice as likely to avoid taking their medication as directed in order to save money.

Of course, as Americans continue to struggle to afford their prescription drugs, Big Pharma is reaping the benefits. The 11 largest drug companies’ profits have been soaring for the past eight years, and they raked in almost $85 billion in 2012.

Unfortunately, profiting at the expense of workers isn’t exclusive to Big Pharma. As Kleinrock notes, even the Americans who currently have insurance are now being forced to cut back on their care, since their employers continue to shift more of their health care costs onto them. Across the country, employees’ contributions to their health insurance plans have skyrocketed at the same time as those workers’ wages have stagnated. That’s especially true for the low-wage workers who are employed by large chain companies in the restaurant industry, whose CEOs have repeatedly complained about the cost of providing adequate health benefits under Obamacare — and keep attempting to find unscrupulous ways to circumvent the health reform law.

In a fiery decision on Friday, U.S. District Judge Edward Korman denied the Obama administration’s motion to delay an order to immediately allow over-the-counter access to emergency contraception to women of all ages. After Korman initially ordered in April that the so-called “morning-after pill” be available to all women and girls without a prescription, the FDA instead decided to lower the age limit to teens 15 and up rather than 17. However, those 15- and 16-year-olds will only have over-the-counter access to one brand of emergency contraception pill, Teva Pharmaceutical’s Plan B One-Step, thanks to what Korman called a “sweetheart arrangement” between the FDA and Teva.

Blasting the Obama administration’s argument as “an insult to the intelligence of women,” Korman attacked the FDA’s decision to lower the age restriction for Plan B rather than comply with his order to allow all women access to any brand of emergency contraception. The judge accused the administration of delaying his ruling so as to give Teva Pharmaceutical sole access to the market of 15- to 17-year olds without a prescription. Generic versions of Plan B, meanwhile, will stay behind the pharmacy counter for this age group.

Korman also noted that Teva will drive up the price of the pill now that it has a monopoly on young women in need:

While this proposal was a boon to Teva, it did little to eliminate the practical obstructions in obtaining emergency contraception to women of child-bearing age whether over or under age 15. On the contrary, Teva will use its privileged marketing status and exclusivity to increase the cost of the drug. The price of Plan B One-Step under the new marketing regime is expected to be $60, significantly more than the one- or two-pill generic version, and could conceivably go higher, if only to accommodate the more expensive packing, age-verification tags, and anti-theft technology that the new marketing arrangement would require.

As Teva profits from the Obama administration’s arbitrary age restriction, the burden on women seeking emergency contraception will only grow larger. Younger teens and undocumented women unable to prove their age with government-issued ID will still not have access, and may not be able to afford the new cost. As Korman points out, the Teva-FDA deal still requires Plan B to be sold over the counter at stores with on-site pharmacies, even though many women do not live near such facilities. The decision also cites a survey of 943 pharmacies in 5 cities, which found that only 4.7 percent stayed open 24 hours. Given the time-sensitive and often urgent need for emergency contraception, limiting the hours and locations where women can buy the drug could have serious consequences.

Moreover, there is no medical reason to limit access to the morning-after pill. Despite the Obama administration’s concern that it could be “dangerous” to young teens, an enormous body of research has demonstrated emergency contraception is safer than aspirin for women of all ages.

A recent report found that the United States has the highest rate of first-day infant death in the industrialized world. It’s unclear why the U.S. continues to struggle so much with infant mortality, but it’s likely partly tied to some women’s substandard prenatal care. Women’s health experts agree that there’s one way to ensure that women’s pregnancies are as healthy as possible: ensuring access to affordable family planning programs.

At first glance, the link between birth control and healthy babies may not seem obvious. But, according to research from the Guttmacher Institute, there’s actually a big correlation between giving women the resources to determine the timing of their pregnancies and the health outcomes of those pregnancies. When women who have multiple children are able to space out their pregnancies, their children are less likely to be born prematurely or have low birth weights. There’s also mounting evidence that women who unintentionally become pregnant tend to receive worse prenatal care than the women who who are able to plan their pregnancies — partly because when pregnancies are unintended, women may go weeks or even months without realizing they’re pregnant. And when couples don’t use contraception, they have about an 85 percent chance of an unintended pregnancy within a year.

Guttmacher estimates that public family planning programs — specifically, the publicly funded services that are supported by Medicaid and Title X funding — help avoid 1.94 million unintended pregnancies every year. On the other hand, if low-income women in the United States didn’t have access to the preventative care at those clinics, there would be an annual additional 860,000 unplanned births and 810,000 abortions in this country.

Unfortunately, however, those essential public family planning clinics are under attack across the country. Since Planned Parenthood affiliates often run women’s health clinics with Medicaid dollars, anti-choice Republicans have seized on the opportunity to target the organization by defunding its publicly-funded programs. Even though GOP lawmakers have framed their crusade against Planned Parenthood in terms of their opposition to abortion, public funds cannot actually finance abortion services. When family planning clinics get defunded, it doesn’t do anything to stop abortion — but it does deal a blow to the quest to improve infant death rates by undercutting women’s critical preventative care.

Over the past two years, Republicans have attacked family planning in ten different states. The consequences of those battles have perhaps been most evident in Texas, where state officials slashed Title X funds and excluded Planned Parenthood from the local Medicaid program. After realizing that unintended births are likely to rise dramatically, Texas Republicans have finally pledged to start working to restore the women’s health funding that they slashed in 2011.

Looks like Obamacare is more “on track” than “train wreck.”

In a striking illustration of the promise that the health law holds for consumers, two Oregon private insurers vying to sell coverage on the state’s Obamacare insurance marketplace this October are reevaluating their opening bids for the plans’ monthly premiums. The reason? A side-by-side regional comparison of all proposed 2014 premiums for Oregon marketplace plans became public on Oregon’s marketplace website Thursday, and showed that the two insurers’ planned monthly premiums were far higher than other proposals. That raised fears among the companies’ officials that their plans wouldn’t be competitive on the market later this year, leading them to proactively request a rate reduction — and as more of Obamacare is implemented, state insurance commissioners expect that trend to continue:

“Posting rate comparisons company-by-company is a taste of what is to come,” says Cheryl Martinis of the Oregon Insurance Division.

Judging by the reaction, there’s already an impact.

Providence Health Plan on Wednesday asked to lower its requested rates by 15 percent. Gary Walker, a Providence spokesman, says the “primary driver” was a realization that the plan’s cost projections were incorrect. But he conceded a desire to be competitive was part of it.

A Family Care Health Plans official on Thursday said the insurer will ask the state for even greater decrease in requested rates. CEO Jeff Heatherington says the company realized its analysts were too pessimistic after seeing online that its proposed premiums were the highest.

“That was my question when I saw the rates was, ‘Can we go in and refile these?’” he said. “We’re going to try to get these to a competitive range.”

Although some insurers have been using Obamacare as an excuse to hike premiums despite record profits, such rate hikes have been rarer — and less extreme — since the law’s passage. And to emphasize, this is all happening before the state has had a chance to review and approve initial plan rates — much less launch the actual marketplace. After the exchange opens up, consumers will have even more detailed information about marketplace plans, including the ability to compare — not just rates — but actual benefits offered on the plans side-by-side.

That’s particularly significant because much of the current variation in health plan premiums stems from rampant health care price opacity and wildly divergent benefits offered on different health plans — a status quo that won’t last in the Obamacare era since the law requires qualifying insurance plans to offer a base level of ten “essential health benefits,” including prescription drug, mental health, and maternity services. That means that Americans will be able to go online and figure out whether a plan costs more because it actually provides more robust benefits, or because an insurance company is just trying to gouge prices and maximize profits. Insurance offered on the marketplaces will be separated into Bronze, Silver, and Gold plans based on how generous their offered coverage is, making consumer comparisons between similar health plans simple.

As Thursday’s development shows, that public information empowers consumers by forcing insurers to compete with one another to attract customers. Or to put it another way — and contrary to conservative fear-mongering about the law — Obamacare is working exactly as it was intended to. And with 24 million Americans expected to gain coverage through the marketplaces by 2016, that’s great news for Americans’ pocketbooks — as well as their health.

Almost a third of managed U.S. honey bees died last winter, according to a new survey of commercial and home beekeepers. That’s more than triple the losses of 5 to 10 percent that used to be normal for beekeepers before 2005 — and double the 15 percent that beekeepers say is acceptable for their businesses to continue unharmed.

The finding marks a disturbing trend among honey bees: each winter since 2006, the Bee Informed Partnership has documented losses of 21.9 to 36 percent of U.S. hives. In some states, the die offs have been even more drastic — this year, beekeepers in Montana and South Dakota reported losses of 40 to 50 percent of their hives, and in Maryland, nearly 60 percent of managed bees didn’t make it through the winter.

For some, this year’s losses have been unprecedented, as one beekeeper told the New York Times:

They looked so healthy last spring,” said Bill Dahle, 50, who owns Big Sky Honey in Fairview, Mont. “We were so proud of them. Then, about the first of September, they started to fall on their face, to die like crazy. We’ve been doing this 30 years, and we’ve never experienced this kind of loss before.

The large-scale die offs — attributed in part to a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder — have gained widespread attention in the recent months. That’s partly because if the deaths continue, they could have a major impact on the nation’s food system.

The USDA estimates that one-third of all food and beverages consumed in the U.S. are dependent on pollination, with crops such as almonds and squash relying most heavily on bees to produce seeds. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 71 percent of the world’s most widely-consumed crops are pollinated by bees — and these crops are worth at least $207 billion. But this year, bee losses caused farmers to come extremely close to a pollination crisis, leading to warnings about impending food insecurity.

In April, the European Union implemented a two-year ban on three neonicotinoids, a class of widely-used pesticides that’s been linked in laboratory studies to bee death. The pesticides, which are the most common poisonous chemicals in honey bee environments, attack the bees’ nervous systems, confusing them and impairing their ability to find and gather food. Despite the fact that at least 30 laboratory studies have linked neonicotinoids to bee die offs, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency recently released a report that linked Colony Collapse Disorder to a variety of factors and called for more research on neonicotinoids.

Unsurprisingly, the multibillion-dollar chemical industry has fought against a ban on neonicotinoids, rejecting the scientific evidence that the pesticides are contributing to bee deaths. In March, a group of beekeepers and major consumer and environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club, filed a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency for failing to protect honey bees and other pollinators from neonicotinoids. The EPA is planning on issuing a review of the pesticides and their effect on bees, but it won’t be completed until 2018.

Despite the fact that leading medical organizations agree that abortion does not actually put women at a higher risk for future premature births, North Carolina Republicans want to teach students otherwise. Under a measure that’s currently advancing in the state legislature, the state’s sex ed classes would be required to include scientifically disputed information about the risks of having an abortion.

The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Warren Daniel (R), claims that SB 132 isn’t based on any kind of political ideology. “It’s based on the scientific evidence that you will have a future risk of preterm birth if you decide voluntarily to have an abortion,” Daniel told a Senate Health Committee earlier this week during the initial debate over SB 132.

But the medical professionals who testified against the measure disagree with that assessment. At the same committee hearing, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina, Dr. David Grimes, called the proposed update to the state’s sex ed law “unnecessary and uninformed“:

“Senate Bill 132 would establish a state-sponsored ideology,” he said. “The statement is scientifically false.”

Grimes formerly directed abortion surveillance efforts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The World Health Organization, the CDC, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Pediatricians and the American Public Health Association all have uniformly concluded that abortion does not cause prematurity,” he told the committee. “How did they all get it wrong?”

There’s no good reason to amend the sex ed requirements that the state already has. According to a recent poll from the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina, 83 percent of parents in the state would like schools to continue providing sex education as currently defined under the Healthy Youth Act.

Nonetheless, the measure has already cleared a Senate committee and gotten approval from the full Senate. After this week’s heated debates, Daniel agreed to amend the legislation to add other risk factors for preterm birth — like smoking, drinking, drug use and poor prenatal care — to sexual health instruction. But SB 132 would still enshrine misinformation about abortion into state law. A final vote on the measure could come as early as Monday.

And SB 132 is hardly the only anti-choice legislation currently being considered in North Carolina. Republicans have also introduced a measure that would impose unnecessary, burdensome restrictions on abortion clinics that could ultimately force them to close their doors. At the end of March, hundreds of protesters gathered in the state capital to protest against the proposed clinic rules, telling their anti-abortion legislators that they have no right to interfere in women’s personal medical decisions. And just earlier this week, North Carolina also began advancing a bill that would force teens to get a notarized permission slip from their parents before being able to access sexual health services like birth control pills or STD tests.

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (D) announced on Thursday that he would accept federal money to expand his state’s Medicaid program under Obamacare. That brings the total number of states participating in the optional expansion up to either 22 or 18 (plus the District of Columbia) — depending on the actions of some state legislatures that are still debating the issue.

According to a press release from Beshear’s office, the governor called the move “the single-most important decision in our lifetime for improving the health of Kentuckians” and something that is “in the best interest of the Commonwealth and its citizens.” He also stated that an analysis of the expansion’s costs revealed that non-participation would be mean losing money for the state, echoing the fiscal argument made by West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin (D) last week.

Beshear certainly has his numbers right. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Medicaid expansion will cut Kentucky’s high uninsurance rate by over 55 percent, and the price of noncompliance could be as high as $40 million by 2021. Considering upcoming cuts to safety net hospitals that serve poor residents and the reality that nearly one in three Kentuckians living below 139 percent of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) is uninsured, that would have proven to be an unaffordable cost from both a fiscal and a public health standpoint.

What’s less clear is how much difficulty Beshear will have with gaining the support of lawmakers in a state that has elected ardent Obamacare opponents like Sens. Mitch McConnell (R) and Rand Paul (R). Democrats hold an 11-seat edge in Kentucky’s state House, while Republicans hold an 11-seat edge in the state Senate. Convincing those 11 Republican state senators could be difficult, considering that several other GOP governors in highly uninsured states are still battling their own party members to cooperate with the health law’s Medicaid expansion.

Coca-Cola unveiled a new anti-obesity campaign Wednesday, pledging to better regulate its advertising to children and ensure clear nutritional labeling is available on its drinks around the world.

In the U.S., calorie counts for Coca-Cola products are displayed on the front of drink labels and no-calorie diet versions of drinks are readily available, but in other countries, there’s not as much consistency in product labeling and the availability of diet drinks. Coke’s new push aims to remedy that, and will also halt all advertising targeted at audiences younger than 12.

Coke, which is based in Atlanta, also announced Wednesday that it would contribute $3.8 million to support nutrition education and physical activity programs in Georgia. Most of the money will go toward the Georgia SHAPE program, an initiative that works with k-12 school districts to increase students’ physical activity, and the Centers of Hope program, which connects at-risk students to physical activity and leadership development programs.

While the pledges and donations help improve Coke’s public image, they don’t address the core of the the company’s public health problem: the increasing body of literature that has linked soda and other sugary drink consumption to diabetes, obesity and even death. Even diet drinks — which Coke lauds as some of its healthier options — have been tied to negative health effects, like an increased risk of heart attack, stroke, heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

And despite Coke’s public relations campaign, the company, through the American Beverage Association (ABA), has historically fought against public health efforts to increase government regulation of the soda industry. The ABA has lobbed against soda taxes and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed ban on large soft drinks.

Coke’s most recent efforts come on the heels of an anti-obesity advertising campaign launched by the company in January, which featured TV ads that acknowledged America’s obesity problem and pointed out steps the Coke had taken — including creating smaller portion sizes for its drinks and sponsoring children’s programs such as the Boys and Girls Club — to address the issue. The ad ends by explaining that “all calories count, no matter where they come from,” a claim that sparked an outcry among critics, who point out that calories from soda are entirely empty calories from added sugar and contain no nutritional value.

Two pharmaceutical giants — Merck and GlaxoSmithKline — have announced that they will drop their prices for HPV vaccines that help protect against cervical cancer to about $4.50 per dose for the world’s poorest countries. The move may help tens of millions of girls in dozens of developing nations gain access to life-saving medications that they would previously have been unable to afford.

Although some critics noted that the companies could drop their prices even further, spokespeople for Merck and Glaxo emphasized that they expected the vaccines’ costs to plummett further in the future. That’s particularly significant given that 275,000 women in poor countries die from cervical cancer every year, mainly due to the high costs of preventative medical services:

The low price will initially apply to a few million doses for demonstration projects in Kenya, Ghana, Laos, Madagascar and elsewhere, but Dr. Seth Berkley, the alliance’s chief executive officer, said he hoped that by 2020, 30 million girls in 40 countries would get the vaccine at that price or less.

The vaccines cost about $130 a dose in the United States, and each girl needs three doses. The lowest price that any other agency or government has negotiated, Dr. Berkley said, is the $13 paid by the Pan American Health Organization, which negotiates a bulk price for Latin American countries. [...]

Dr. Berkley described the new prices as a ceiling, and said he expected them to go down as millions more doses were ordered and as rival vaccine makers from lower-cost countries like India and China entered the field. Other companies, including the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, are developing papillomavirus vaccines, but at the moment only the Glaxo and Merck vaccines have approval from the World Health Organization.

Combined with robust public outreach efforts to administer the vaccinations, the lower prices could swell the ranks of immunized women in developing nations beyond the U.S.’s current rates, which the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has deemed “unacceptably low.”

In fact, the financial and medical benefits of the price cut for poor women could be even greater if the shots are given to younger girls aged nine to 13. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that just two doses of the vaccine were enough to immunize girls in that age range, as opposed to the usual three — meaning that women in developing nations could be protected for a lifetime for just $9 or even less.

Drug accessibility in developing nations has always been a major problem in the public health community, since brand name pharmaceutical companies tend to charge much more for their products than residents of such countries can afford. These drug makers also extend the life of their product patents through gimmicks such as adding “inactive ingredients” to the original medications. The Indian Supreme Court recently ruled against pharmaceutical giant Novartis for precisely this, instead siding with a generic drug manufacturer that distributes a much cheaper — but equally effective — version of the brand name company’s cancer drug. Merck and Glaxo’s proactive decision to cut their HPV vaccine prices means that there are even bigger savings in the future as generic drug makers step up their efforts to compete in the pharmaceutical marketplace.

Earlier this month, Wrigley became the latest company to launch a line of caffeinated gum with its new “Alert Energy” product, which contains about half as much caffeine as a cup of coffee in each stick. But now, in the wake of the Food and Drug Administration’s concern about the product’s potential effect on children, the company is pulling Alert Energy from the shelves.

The FDA recently met with Wrigley to express its concerns over the new gum’s safety for children. Although there are other types of caffeinated gum on the market, they’re all sold by companies that solely specialize in energy products — so, even though Wrigley promised it wouldn’t be targeting its new gum toward kids, the FDA worried it might not be as clear to parents and children that Alert Energy does contain an additive. The federal agency, concerned about the growing trend of marketing caffeinated products to children, announced that it will launch an investigation into the effects that added caffeine has on children.

While FDA officials have acknowledged that enforcing an age restriction for caffeine is unlikely, they point out that carding Americans for coffee is an entirely different issue than regulating the amount of caffeine that may be added to products that kids typically enjoy. “For me, the more fundamental questions are whether it is appropriate to use foods that may be inherently attractive and accessible to children as the vehicles to deliver the stimulant caffeine,” Michael Taylor, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, explained.

Talyor applauded Wrigley’s decision to stop producing and marketing its Alert Energy gum. “The company’s action demonstrates real leadership and commitment to the public health,” he said, noting that the FDA’s role in regulating caffeinated products remains unresolved while the agency pursues its current investigation. “We hope others in the food industry will exercise similar restraint.”

Energy drinks are another highly-caffeinated product receiving increased scrutiny in recent months. After emergency room visits related to energy drinks more than doubled over the past five years, health advocates started calling on the FDA to strengthen its regulatory oversight over this sector of the beverage industry — which often gets around FDA guidelines by classifying energy drinks as “dietary supplements” rather than “drinks.”

Over the past several weeks, abortion opponents have been tripping over themselves to attempt to link Kermit Gosnell’s horrific crimes to legal abortion providers, attempting to leverage the outrage over the Philadelphia abortion doctor’s murder trial into concrete legislation to restrict abortion access. Of course, much of the hysteria over Gosnell is misleading, since his illegal clinic is not necessarily representative of the larger state of abortion care in the United States. Fed up with the ongoing misinformation campaign, Democratic lawmakers are countering the current obsession with Gosnell with some legislative initiatives of their own.

This week, a group of Republican senators invoked Gosnell’s name to put forth a resolution calling for more investigation into legal abortion clinics across the country — ultimately, a thinly-veiled effort to encourage states to impose unnecessary, burdensome regulations that will force those clinics to shut down. In response, Democratic senators have introduced their own resolution to condemn all illegal medical acts, not just those that occur within the context of abortion services.

The Democratic-sponsored resolution (PDF) — spearheaded by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (CT), Barbara Boxer (CA) and Jeanne Shaheen (NH) — calls on the Senate to investigate, condemn, and ultimately work to prevent “all incidents of abusive, unsanitary, or illegal health care practices.” It’s a pointed statement that, despite the right wing’s attempts to construe all abortion clinics as dangerous, Gosnell’s crimes don’t actually mean that abortion itself is an inherently unsafe medical practice. Instead, the abortion doctor simply serves as an example of the criminal medical behavior that is evident in other areas of the health care sector — as well as the persistent economic and racial inequality that contributes to health disparities.

Some most recent examples of medical malpractice include the Nevada-based health care company that put thousands of people at risk for hepatitis and the Oklahoma dentist who infected at least 60 patients with HIV and hepatitis. Of course, there hasn’t been the same widespread right-wing outrage about the situations that led to those crimes — revealing an inherent double standard when it comes to abortion.

The Senate rejected the Republican resolution on Gosnell on Thursday afternoon. “It is difficult to imagine why anyone would object to a non-binding resolution calling on Congress to investigate these alleged disturbing, horrific and illegal abortion practices committed by Kermit Gosnell and others,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), who sponsored the resolution, said on the floor. But Blumenthal pointed out that the Democratic resolution is more accurate because it applies to broad health care abuses without singling out Gosnell.

Colorado is bringing health care reform to a TV ad near you.

With over 40 percent of Americans still unsure whether or not Obamacare is even the law of the land, and an open enrollment period for its statewide insurance exchanges that begins in less than five months, Colorado is pumping $2 million into an outreach effort aimed at preparing consumers for upcoming changes under the health law. This makes Colorado the first state to mount an aggressive push to raise awareness of one of Obamacare’s most important provisions for uninsured individuals and small businesses — although Oregon and Kentucky aren’t far behind with their own PR campaigns planned for next month.

Colorado is unveiling a state-run website to give residents more detailed information about Obamacare, and help them figure out whether they will qualify for federally subsidized individual or small business coverage once Colorado’s insurance marketplace opens up in October. For the next two months, the state will also run television spots and print, radio, and billboard ads highlighting the insurance marketplaces, where insurers must compete to offer Americans health coverage:

While the vast majority of Americans are already benefiting from Obamacare’s consumer protections and insurance reforms, enrolling the previously uninsured into health plans on the state-level marketplaces will be critical for successful implementation of the law, and integral to reducing America’s uninsurance rate while improving public health. Some 24 million Americans are expected to receive insurance through the marketplaces by 2016.

But not everybody agrees that now is the proper time to begin the outreach efforts. Some federal officials worry that such education campaigns may be premature, and end up confusing consumers by advertising a product that doesn’t even exist yet. “Our research has shown if you go too early, you don’t have anything to offer, and people lose interest. It will be intense, but the timing is important,” Medicare chief Marilyn Tavenner explained to the Washington Post.

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Lawmakers often take advantage of the fact that the residents of the nation’s capital don’t have any representation in Congress in order to turn DC into their legislative playground. This session is no exception, as Republicans in both chambers of Congress have taken steps to restrict abortion access for the DC women who aren’t actually their own constituents.

Last week, Arizona Rep. Trent Franks (R) reintroduced a bill to criminalize abortion services in DC after 20 weeks of pregnancy, the exact same measure that failed to advance when Franks pushed it last year. And now, Utah Sen. Mike Lee (R) has introduced a companion bill in the Senate. Like Franks, Lee is no stranger to this type of abortion ban. Earlier this year, he tried to accomplish the same goal by offering a budget amendment to restrict DC women’s abortion access.

20-week bans are based on the scientifically dubious claim that fetuses can feel pain after that point — and they’re a top priority for anti-choice activists, who are intent on leveraging the emotional outrage surrounding incredibly late-term abortions to narrow the window for legal abortion services. In reality, however, late-term abortions are already very rare, representing less than one percent of all abortion services across the country. Criminalizing them ends up disproportionately hurting women in two categories: the low-income women who are forced to delay abortion while they save up the money to pay for it, and the women who discover serious fetal abnormalities later in their pregnancies.

Lee’s anti-abortion agenda is keeping him particularly busy lately. He’s also using Kermit Gosnell’s high-profile murder trial as an excuse to spearhead a Senate resolution to encourage more abortion clinic restrictions across the country.

Despite lauding new, “healthier” choices such as egg whites and wraps, major fast food chains’ menus haven’t improved much over the past decade in terms of nutritional value, according to a new study.

The study, recently published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, looked at the menus of eight fast food chains between 1997 and 2010. Researchers judged menus by using the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Healthy Eating Index, a 100-point scale that determines the nutritional value of American diets based on the variety of foods eaten; the intake of each major food group; and the intake of fat, cholesterol and sodium. The study found fast food menus only increased their nutritional value by three points in the last 14 years — from 45 to 48 points. The score is lower than the general American food supply’s score of 60 points and far below the 80-plus points that the USDA recommends for a “good” diet.

And the scores of the menus from the eight restaurants studied — McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Arby’s, Jack in the Box and Dairy Queen — actually worsened over time in the sodium category. That result is especially alarming, given that overuse of salt in the food and restaurant industry now contributes to an estimated 100,000 American deaths per year.

The study provides empirical evidence for a growing trend among fast food restaurants: marketing “healthy” options with little added nutrition in order to make the restaurants as a whole seem healthier. In April, McDonald’s introduced the Egg White Delight McMuffin, an item which contains 34 percent of an adult’s daily sodium intake and only 50 fewer calories than the original McMuffin. The restaurant chain also made its green-wrapped (and therefore healthier-looking) chicken McWraps, which contain up to 590 calories and 44 percent of a person’s recommended daily fat intake, a permanent menu item. And in March, Buger King rolled out a turkey burger that weighs in at 530 calories and contains more sodium than a Whopper.

The study’s findings have serious implications for Americans’ diets. As the report notes, one in four American adults eat fast food at least twice a week — which contributes to the fact that the quick, convenient food choice currently accounts for 15 percent of Americans’ total energy intake. The findings also echo results from a recent study that found the kids’ menus in popular chain restaurants fall short of USDA nutrition recommendations a staggering 97 percent of the time.

In an editorial accompanying the study, Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, called on fast food chains to reduce portion sizes for food and drinks, offer more fruit, vegetables and whole grains, and reduce their menu items’ sodium content. She also suggested requiring all restaurants — not just the large chain restaurants required under Obamacare — to post calorie counts on their menus so that consumers could distinguish for themselves which options were healthier.

For more than a year, Texas lawmakers have been on a crusade against Planned Parenthood that has resulted in deep cuts to family planning services that thousands of women rely on. But, particularly after the state’s health department projected a sharp rise in unintended births as a direct result of the budget cuts, Texas Republicans are finally starting to regret that move. In an attempt to appease the voters who have attacked them for undermining low-income women’s preventative health resources, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are now quietly working to restore the family planning funding they slashed.

As the Texas Tribune reports, the Democrats and Republicans in the state have struck an uneasy balance. Democrats have promised to stop fighting to restore state funding to Planned Parenthood, while Republicans have pledged to stop imposing additional barriers to women’s health care access:

“The major difference is we’re not fighting about it, we’re just doing what’s right for women and the state,” state Rep. Sarah Davis, R-West University Place, said last month at a Texas Tribune symposium on health care.

There has not been a drawn-out public debate on abortion or women’s health in either chamber this legislative session. None of the 24 abortion-related bills filed have reached the House or Senate floor. And Davis, the only Republican member of the House Women’s Health Caucus, brokered a bipartisan “grand bargain,” as lawmakers refer to it, to prevent amendments to the House budget bill that could have jeopardized an agreement to restore women’s health dollars.

For some Republicans, this bargain hinged on the ballot box: Davis said several of her colleagues faced blistering attacks after last session’s family planning cuts — an effort, in part, to drive Planned Parenthood out of business — shuttered clinics in their districts that were not affiliated with abortion providers.

Davis told the Texas Tribune that she is committed to providing adequate resources for family planning services for low-income women, and the best way to get that done is to “remove emotion” from the legislative process. According to Davis, the recent arguments about abortion and Planned Parenthood that fueled the legislature’s decision to slash those resources “did not advance the ball,” but rather “threw family planning into a tailspin.”

She’s right. Since the state cut its family planning budget by two-thirds, 53 family planning clinics have been forced to close their doors and an estimated 144,000 fewer women have received preventative health care. So now, in the state’s tentative 2014-15 budget, lawmakers are considering devoting even more money for women’s health services than the state was allocating to that area before the 2011 budget cuts.

But, in order to get Republicans on board, that funding is still being strictly designated to clinics that don’t provide abortion services. Texas legislators may be coming around on some aspects of women’s health, but fights over abortion continue to simmer under the surface. Gov. Rick Perry (R) — who has maintained that outlawing all abortion is his ultimate “goal” — has thrown his weight behind a 20-week abortion ban, and lawmakers are considering a measure that could force some abortion clinics in the state to close. Although lawmakers are finally realizing that low-income women have the right to accessible birth control and family planning counseling, they’re not concerned about those same women’s access to affordable abortion care.

One of the most important ongoing stories in the realm of budgets and health care economics is the remarkable drop in how much health care costs are projected to grow over the next decade. Back in March, David Cutler and Nikhil Sahni released some preliminary work arguing that, thanks to this slowdown, projections of government spending on health care for the next decade were overshooting by hundreds of billions of dollars. Now they’ve released a more complete paper (gated) with a specific number: if the lower growth rate continues, the federal government could save $770 billion by 2021. Furthermore, Cutler and Sahni concluded that as much as 55 percent of the slowdown has been driven by factors other than the recession.

That last point is especially important. If the slowdown in growth is due to the recession, then it’s temporary. Health care costs will once again rise at their previous rate once the economy recovers, driving health-related spending to ever greater heights and further straining the budgets of both the government and American families. But if the slowdown is due to deeper, structural changes in health care markets, then at least some portion of the slowdown may be long-term. And the government’s projections of future debt and deficits rely heavily on those previous assumptions of high health care cost growth. So if the slowdown sticks, the outlook for America’s fiscal future could improve radically, all without lawmakers cutting a dime.

Here’s Bloomberg with a nice summary:

Cutler’s research compared the U.S. government’s growth projections for health spending from 2004 to 2012 with actual increases in the period. It found that the real growth rate was about half of the government’s prediction, leading to a gap of more than $500 billion in 2012 between the projections and spending.

The paper calculates that the recession accounted for about 37 percent of the slowdown in health costs from 2003 to 2011. Declining private insurance coverage and cuts in payments byMedicare, (USBOMDCR)the government health plan for the elderly and disabled, accounted for another 8 percent and the remaining 55 percent is “unexplained,” Cutler wrote. That’s where the structural changes come in, he said.

If the current lower-than-expected rate of growth continues, the country may reap savings of as much as $770 billion through 2021, the research found.

As always, there’s a lot of uncertainty built in here. Another recent study by Kaiser, for instance, suggested that as much as 77 percent of the slowdown is a temporary result of the recession. Also, there’s a lot of complexity in the category of “structural” changes. Some of it’s improvements in the efficiency of health care delivery, quite possibly thanks to reforms in Obamacare that encourage providers to change the way they do business. Other parts of it may be one-time shifts in the market, such as the rise of generic drugs to replace more high-cost brand-name medicines.

The broader point, however, is that there are more ways to balance the budget than just slashing the aid and benefits Americans need to buy. A better-designed health care system could very well deliver lower and more efficient government spending than austerity ever could.

When Amanda Knox was accused of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in 2007, the prosecution and the Italian media helped fuel baseless but titillating rumors that Knox was a sex fiend who killed Kercher for refusing to participate in an orgy. On Tuesday night, Chris Cuomo attempted to bully and shame the 25-year-old with his own theories about her sex life.

Cuomo peppered Knox with invasive questions about her sexual preferences, demanding to know if she was hiding “freaky sexual things”:

CUOMO: Were you into deviant sex? Insensitive question, but hey, we gotta get to what it is. This fuels the doubt. Were you into that kind of experimentation?

KNOX: No.

CUOMO: Did Meredith suspect you were into these types of things and created a barrier between the two of you?

KNOX: No.

CUOMO: And therefore you resented her because she was judging you? None of that?

KNOX: No. Absolutely not. There’s no evidence of that.

CUOMO: That’s the theory. Knox is into some freaky sexual things. She tried to pull in Meredith, who was a staid, buttoned-up Brit, she wasn’t into it, and it went wrong…That was in the discussion of the judges, yes?

KNOX: Absolutely. I was there in the courtroom when they were calling me things like “violent,” “whore,” and “deviant.” And it’s all untrue.

CUOMO: Where are they getting that from? Did you have any type of experimental activities that you’re embarrassed to talk about? That they know about?

KNOX: Well in the book I talk about all my sexual experiences, and I haven’t needed to talk about the details of that because they aren’t deviant. I wasn’t strapping on leather and bearing a whip. I’ve never done that.

CUOMO: No group activities?

KNOX: I’ve never taken part in an orgy, ever.

Watch it:

As Knox became more agitated and appeared to be on the verge of tears, Cuomo continued to insist that someone must have told the prosecution that Knox had a secret kinky sex life, even asserting, “you’re a freak!” Finally, she burst out:

They didn’t get it from me, and they didn’t get it from witnesses. It literally came from the prosecution. And this is what I’ve been up against this entire time. This fact that the prosecution was projecting onto what happened their own theories about young women and women who are…I was sexually active. I was not sexually deviant.

Cuomo’s attempt to use suggestions of sexual deviance to bully Knox follows in a long tradition of public entitlement to scrutinize and judge female sexuality. The recent string of highly publicized sexual assaults has exposed how the media weaves narratives in which “drunk party girls” get what they deserve. Meanwhile, comprehensive sex education is stifled in many conservative states lest children become too comfortable with their sexuality.

However, many women are starting to call out their bullies, from Anne Hathaway’s cold response to questions about a revealing photo to 17-year-old Katelyn Campbell’s protest of an abstinence assembly that told students their mothers would hate them if they used birth control. Most recently, kidnap and rape victim Elizabeth Smart spoke out about the culture of sexual purity that taught her she was worthless after her rape. And Knox, staying composed in response to Cuomo’s probing, firmly refused to equate sexuality with guilt in the public eye.