Tag Archives: health

World leadership could cancel out Trump’s polluting ways.

by BrigidaPrevost0 Posted on May 16, 2017

In early May, laborers harvesting cabbage in a field near Bakersfield, California, caught a whiff of an odor. Some suddenly felt nauseated.

A local news station reported that winds blew the pesticide Vulcan — which was being sprayed on a mandarin orchard owned by the produce company Sun Pacific — into Dan Andrews Farms’ cabbage patch.

Vulcan’s active ingredient, chlorpyrifos, has been banned for residential use for more than 15 years. It was scheduled to be off-limits to agriculture this year — until the EPA gave it a reprieve in March. Kern County officials are still confirming whether Sun Pacific’s insecticide contained chlorpyrifos.

More than 50 farmworkers were exposed, and 12 reported symptoms, including vomiting and fainting. One was hospitalized. “Whether it’s nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, seek medical attention immediately,” a Kern County Public Health official warned.

If chlorpyrifos’ presence is confirmed, the EPA may have some explaining to do. The Dow Chemical compound is a known neurotoxin, and several studies connect exposure to it with lower IQ in children and other neurological deficits.

The Scott Pruitt–led agency, however, decided that — and stop me if you’ve heard this one before — the science wasn’t conclusive.

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World leadership could cancel out Trump’s polluting ways.

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5 Products Made From Trees to Stop Buying Now

by MarcelMahmood Posted on May 13, 2017

The more products we consume that come from the world’s forests, the more trees that need to be cut down to meet the demands of a consumer-driven world. While new trees can certainly be planted to grow in their place, the rate at which we’re cutting down our trees exceeds the rate at which new trees can grow and replace the ones that were cut down.

According to The World Counts, only 10 percent of the world’s rainforests may be left by the year 2030. As a result, as many as 28,000 wildlife species may be extinct in the next 25 years due to deforestation.

It’s up to all of us to become more conscious of what we consume so that we don’t mistakenly support companies that contribute to deforestation. Here are just five types of products to consider scaling back on or avoiding altogether.

1. Paper products like books, stationery, envelopes, notepads,folders, notepads and printer paper.

If it’s made of paper, then it came from a tree. While it may be impossible to completely cut out paper products given that even product packaging is made from paper, there are at least some betteralternatives. More companies are now offering “tree free” alternatives to their paper products, such as products made from post-consumer waste (a.k.a. recycled paper). Other materials to look for in tree-free paper product alternatives include hemp, bamboo, kenaf, organic cotton and agri-pulp.

2. Food and beauty productsthat contain palm oil.

Asthemost efficient vegetable oil source, the profitability of palm oil has contributed to immense deforestation in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. You’ll need to check the ingredients on any food or cosmetic you buy to look for signs of palm oil. Check out this list of all the common ingredient names used to describe palm oil, including food and cosmetic brands known to use palm oil in their products.

3. Food products that containwood pulp.

In addition to being used to make paper products and textiles, wood pulp also goes by the name of cellulose, which is added to popular food products. It’s a cheap filler with no nutritional value that can typically be easily identified in the ingredients of any food product. You may want to have a look at these 15 food companies and a list of their products that contain cellulose so you’ll know to avoid them.

4. Furniture or other wood products made from over-harvested trees.

If you’ve got interior or exterior design on the mind, it can be tempting to look for products made of teak, walnut, mahogany and other over-harvested wood types.A more environmentally friendly approach would be to look for used furniture (such as from garage sales or antique shops) andtake advantage ofreclaimed wood in your woodworking projects (such as wood from demolished barns, wine barrels or shipping crates).

5. Chocolate and other cocoa products.

It’s a sad fact that cocoa farming has led to the vastdeforestation of forested areas in West Africa. On the bright side, 12 of the world’s largest cocoa manufacturers including Mars, Nestle and Ferrero have recently all agreed to come up with a plan by this November to stop cocoa farmers from having to cutdown so many trees. In the meantime, there are lots of places both online and offline that you can find ethically-sourced chocolate and cocoa products, which use cocoa that comes from outside West Africa and is almost always ethically grown.

Related Articles
Eating Vegetables Each Day Can Help Reduce Stress, According to Study
Red Wine Compound Benefits Brain Health, But There’s a Downside
Could Microwaving Tea Be the Key to Greater Antioxidant Benefits?

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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5 Products Made From Trees to Stop Buying Now

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Here’s What the Trump Administration Did This Week While All Eyes Were on Comey

by AlexandraNewberr Posted on May 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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It’s been James Comey week, and rightly so: President Donald Trump’s firing of the FBI director threatens the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Some Democrats are calling it a constitutional crisis and even some Republicans say an independent investigation is necessary. But while everyone was watching the Comey saga unfold, the Trump administration continued to advance its agenda. Here’s what happened while you weren’t paying attention:

The administration launched a commission that could suppress voting.
Trump signed an executive order establishing a vote fraud commission on Thursday to study “vulnerabilities in voting systems and practices used for Federal elections that could lead to improper voter registrations and improper voting, including fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting.” Since voting fraud is nearly nonexistent problem, civil rights advocates are rightly concerned that it’ll be used to justify voting suppression efforts. As Mother Jones‘ Pema Levy reported, the leadership of the commission gives further credence to these concerns.

The Justice Department reupped the war on drugs.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Friday that he’s reversing a key part of the Obama administration’s criminal justice reform. Sessions has instructed federal prosecutors to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense.” Former Attorney General Eric Holder’s guidance had directed prosecutors to pursue drug charges in a way that did not trigger mandatory minimum sentences if defendants met certain criteria such as not belonging to a gang or major drug trafficking organization. “Jeff Sessions is pushing federal prosecutors to reverse progress and repeat a failed experiment—the War on Drugs—that has devastated the lives and rights of millions of Americans, ripping apart families and communities and setting millions, particularly Black people and other people of color, on a vicious cycle of incarceration,” said Udi Ofer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Campaign for Smart Justice, in a statement.

The EPA signaled that it’s choosing industry over science.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt dismissed half the scientists from the agency’s 18-member Board of Scientific Counselors and is considering replacing them with industry representatives. “The administrator believes we should have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community,” an EPA spokesperson told the New York Times. The board gives advice and recommendations to ensure the integrity of the EPA’s scientific research and has been the target of political attacks from industry groups and Republicans. “If they are proposing that the decisions not be based on science, what is it they are proposing they be based on?” Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told ThinkProgress. “The alternative is pure politics. Who has the most influence?”

The health secretary rejected effective treatment for opioid addiction.
Trump has promised to fight the opioid epidemic and appointed a commission to address the issue, but comments from the government’s top health executive raise concerns about the administration’s approach. When asked about drug treatment this week during an event about the crisis, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said, “If we’re just substituting one opioid for another, we’re not moving the dial much. Folks need to be cured so they can be productive members of society and realize their dreams.” The website for the National Institutes of Health says it’s a myth that medicine-assisted treatment substitutes “one addiction for another,” and studies have shown it to be effective. “This is a dangerous, dangerous statement,” physician Corey Waller, chair of legislative advocacy for the American Society of Addiction Medicine, told Politico. “He is moving out of the world of scientific fact into the world of alternative facts.”

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Here’s What the Trump Administration Did This Week While All Eyes Were on Comey

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Trumpcare Will Make the Opioid Crisis Worse

by london Posted on May 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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There are plenty of reasons why the Obamacare repeal bill that House Republicans passed Thursday afternoon is so controversial. It slashes funding for Medicaid, threatens to raise health insurance premiums for older Americans, and allows states to roll back protections for people with preexisting medical conditions.

But there’s another, less publicized, way in which the GOP’s American Health Care Act could disrupt health care throughout the country. In the midst of the most devastating drug epidemic in US history, the legislation could disrupt addiction coverage for millions of Americans. And thanks to a provision added to the bill last week, insurance companies in some states might no longer include mental health and substance abuse coverage in their health plans.

Because of the speed with which Republicans rushed the bill through the House, the Congressional Budget Office hasn’t yet had time to estimate the number of Americans who would lose their health insurance or how premiums would be affected. But according to a CBO report from March, an earlier version of legislation would have resulted in 24 million fewer people having coverage than under Obamacare. The current legislation will likely result in a similar number of uninsured Americans, says Richard Frank, a professor of health economics at Harvard University. Frank and his colleague, Sherry Glied of New York University, estimate that if Obamacare is repealed, 3 million Americans with addiction disorders would lose some or all of their coverage.

Many of the states that voted Trump into office are among the hardest hit by the opioid epidemic—and are the most dependent on Obamacare for substance abuse treatment. The maps below, produced by the US Department of Health and Human Services in the last days of the Obama administration, show this overlap: Red states on the left have the highest overdose rates per capita; red states on the right have the highest rate of residents who would lose coverage if Obamacare is repealed.

US Department of Health and Human Services

Obamacare was particularly important for those seeking addiction treatment, according to Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University psychiatry professor who advised the Obama administration on drug policy. “It was designed to be very broad, but at the same time we knew that if there was anything that this would help a lot for, it’s addiction,” he told me in February.

That’s largely because of two big changes that Obamacare made to insurance markets—changes that the GOP legislation would roll back or undo completely.

First, Obamacare required insurance companies to cover certain “essential benefits,” including substance abuse and mental health treatment. In order to sell insurance in the individual marketplaces, companies would have to cover addiction treatment, as well as other care such as contraception, emergency services, and pediatric services. (Here‘s the full list of essential benefits.) This was a significant change. In 2011, before Obamacare went into effect, “somewhere close to 40 percent of individual and small group market plans didn’t offer substance abuse and mental health coverage,” says Frank. “And when they did, it was quite limited.”

The bill passed by the House would allow states to opt out of the essential benefits requirements, which means that insurers might once again refuse to cover treatment for mental health and addiction.

The second big Obamacare change for substance abuse treatment was the expansion of Medicaid coverage to millions of additional poor Americans. As I wrote earlier this year:

Under the Affordable Care Act, those who earn up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible for this government-funded insurance program. In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that states could choose whether or not they wanted to participate in the program, and 31 states have done so—resulting in health coverage for an additional 11 million Americans through Medicaid expansion. Of those, an estimated 1.3 million used their newly acquired insurance for substance abuse or mental health services, according to an analysis by researchers Richard Frank of Harvard Medical School and Sherry Glied of New York University. In states that expanded Medicaid, 20 percent of hospital admissions for substance abuse and mental health disorders were uninsured in 2013, before the bulk of the expansion provisions kicked in. By the middle of 2015, the uninsured rate had fallen to five percent.

The Republicans’ health care plan would freeze Medicaid expansion, cutting off funds for states adding new enrollees starting in 2020. Those already enrolled in Medicaid expansion plans by 2020 would continue to receive the benefits, but they would be at constant risk of losing that insurance. Anyone who has a gap in insurance coverage of more a month—say because they miss a deadline or their income temporarily changes—would lose eligibility. (A lack of private health insurance would be penalized too: Going more than 63 days without coverage would increase premiums by 30 percent for a year.) These provisions have a lot of public health advocates worried. It’s not uncommon for people, particularly those with serious mental health and addiction problems, to drift in and out of insurance coverage.

Without Obamacare, said Humphreys, “We’re back where we were before: bad access, low quality of care, and a lot of patients being turned away.”

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Trumpcare Will Make the Opioid Crisis Worse

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Trump Budget Would Slash Funds for Office Fighting Opioid Epidemic

by mathiaskoonce Posted on May 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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The White House is calling for a 95 percent funding cut for the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the agency leading the charge against the country’s opioid epidemic, according to sources knowledgeable about the White House’s draft budget for the coming fiscal year. ONDCP is responsible for coordinating drug prevention programs across federal agencies and was slated to fund President Donald Trump’s much-lauded opioid commission.

The budget would slash ONDCP’s $380 million budget to $24 million. It would eliminate the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program, which coordinates local, state, and national efforts to reduce drug trafficking and has a $250 million annual budget. It would also cut the Drug-Free Communities Support Program, which funds community-based youth substance abuse prevention programs. The budget calls both programs “duplicative of other Federal programs.” The budget is a “passback” draft: it was cleared by the White House budget office last week, but will still need to be approved by Congress.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to “spend the money” to address the opioid epidemic, but his proposed budgets and policies thus far would drastically cut federal funding to tackle the issue. The Republican health care bill passed by the House of Representatives on Thursday would cause an estimated 3 million Americans to lose some or all of their addiction treatment coverage.

The president tapped New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in March to lead an opioid commission, which reports to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The commission’s purpose is to draft priorities and recommendations for future policies, but critics say that it wastes precious time, given that the surgeon general’s office in the Obama administration published a similar report last November. As one Democratic congressional staffer said last month, “How many more people will die of opioid overdose while they’re pretending to care?”

In an email to his staff, acting ONDCP director Richard Baum wrote:

I have been encouraged by the Administration’s commitment to addressing the opioid epidemic, and the President’s personal engagement on the issue, both during the campaign and since he was sworn into office. However, OMB’s proposed cuts are also at odds with the fact that the President has tasked us with supporting his Commission on Combatting Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis.

These drastic proposed cuts are frankly heartbreaking and, if carried out, would cause us to lose many good people who contribute greatly to ONDCP’s mission and core activities.

I don’t want to see this happen.

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Trump Budget Would Slash Funds for Office Fighting Opioid Epidemic

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Look at These Republicans Celebrating a Bill That Will Gut Health Care for Millions

by KerstinAbrahams Posted on May 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump stood alongside House Republicans in the Rose Garden Thursday to applaud the narrow passage of legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare. The bill, also known as the American Health Care Act, aims to effectively gut health care coverage for millions, cut Medicaid funding by 25 percent, and allow states to deny coverage for a slew of pre-existing conditions.

“As much as we’ve come up with a really incredible health care plan, this has brought the Republican party together,” Trump said. “We’re going to get this finished.”

While there were a handful of female lawmakers present, many on social media pointed to the overwhelming presence of white men on hand to celebrate a bill that seeks to eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood and make pregnancy significantly more expensive:

The setting also appeared somewhat premature, considering the Rose Garden has been historically reserved to mark bill signings. (The American Health Care Act is still subject to a Senate vote.) Still, Trump and Republicans on hand struck a triumphant note.

“Thanks to the leadership of President Donald Trump, welcome to the beginning of the end of Obamacare,” Vice President Mike Pence said, prompting loud applause.

Earlier Thursday, cases of beer were reportedly spotted entering the Capitol, as it became clear Republicans had secured enough votes to ensure the bill’s passage. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), fresh out of foot surgery, also returned to Congress to cast his vote. Many on social media derided his appearance:

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Look at These Republicans Celebrating a Bill That Will Gut Health Care for Millions

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Trump Has No Idea What’s In His Health Care Bill

by Deana19P2532 Posted on April 30, 2017

Mother Jones

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I’m going to go out and throw some frisbees around. In the meantime, enjoy John Dickerson’s interview with Donald Trump about his health care bill:

JOHN DICKERSON: So but in the bill, as it was analyzed, there were two problems. One, and you talked about this with Congressman Robert Aderholt, who brought you the example of the 64-year-old who under Obamacare the premiums–

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But that was a long time ago, John.

JOHN DICKERSON: But has that been fixed?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Totally fixed.

JOHN DICKERSON: How?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: How? We’ve made many changes to the bill. You know, this bill is–

JOHN DICKERSON: What kind though?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: –very much different than it was three weeks ago.

JOHN DICKERSON: Help us explain because there are people–

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The bill–

JOHN DICKERSON: –out there wondering what kind of changes.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Let me explain. Let me explain it to you.

JOHN DICKERSON: Okay.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: This bill is much different than it was a little while ago, okay? This bill has evolved. And we didn’t have a failure on the bill. You know, it was reported like a failure. Now, the one thing I wouldn’t have done again is put a timeline. That’s why on the second iteration, I didn’t put a timeline.

But we have now pre-existing conditions in the bill. We have — we’ve set up a pool for the pre-existing conditions so that the premiums can be allowed to fall. We’re taking across all of the borders or the lines so that insurance companies can compete–

JOHN DICKERSON: But that’s not in–

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: –nationwide.

JOHN DICKERSON: –this bill. The borders are not in–

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Of course, it’s in.

Needless to say, it’s not in. It might be in a future bill, but it’s not in the current bill. On the bright side, I’m impressed that Trump even knows about the high-risk pool, even if he doesn’t quite know what it’s called.

We also learned that Trump’s response to North Korea’s missile test is that he’s not happy. What does that mean? “I would not be happy. If he does a nuclear test, I will not be happy.”

Roger that.

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Trump Has No Idea What’s In His Health Care Bill

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Trump Brought the War on Women Mainstream in His First 100 Days

by CameronByrne88 Posted on April 29, 2017

Mother Jones

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When a video of Donald Trump boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy” leaked a month before the 2016 presidential election and his party seemed on the cusp of rejecting him, onlookers wondered whether his apparent admission of sexual assault might have finally crossed a line with voters. But conservatives who were reassured by his promises to roll back reproductive rights turned a blind eye to the sexual-assault claims.

With those concerns about his electability far behind him, as president Trump has made good on his assurances. He may have discussed child care and other so-called family-friendly policies, but in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, the country has seen an unprecedented rollback of many hard-won reproductive rights. Trump has pushed to defund Planned Parenthood, appointed a Supreme Court justice who he promised would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, and cut off US aide for family-planning services globally. States have also ridden the Trump wave: 1,053 measures—both restrictive and proactive—have been introduced in state legislatures in 2017 alone.

Women have not been passive in the face of these setbacks. They came out in droves to protest Trump’s inauguration during the Women’s March the day after his inauguration. Eleven-thousand women have told Emily’s List, an organization that gets pro-choice women elected to office, that they want to run for something next year, compared with 900 last year. And women already in positions of power have taken Trump to task on his Cabinet nominees, his travel ban, and his environmental policies.

But if his first 100 days as president are any indication, the three-plus years ahead will be grueling for women in the United States and abroad. Here’s what’s happened so far.

Planned Parenthood

In the weeks following Trump’s January 2017 inauguration, his daughter Ivanka took the unexpected step of reaching out to Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards to request a meeting. On the campaign trail, her father had promised to “defund” the women’s health care provider by prohibiting low-income patients from using their Medicaid coverage for care at Planned Parenthood clinics because the group also performs abortions.

Richards sought to explain to Ivanka Trump that Medicaid reimbursements to Planned Parenthood don’t fund abortions, but instead go to other forms of reproductive health care—cancer screenings, pap smears, contraception, and more—because of the Hyde Amendment, which has prohibited the use of federal funds for almost all abortions for more than 40 years.

But in the months following the meeting, the Trump administration and the GOP-controlled Congress launched an offensive against Planned Parenthood. Bills proposing to prohibit the use of Medicaid by patients at Planned Parenthood were introduced in both the House and the Senate and are still awaiting a vote. A week after Trump’s inauguration, audio was leaked of a closed-door meeting where Republicans voiced concerns about the political repercussions of defunding a women’s health organization that’s popular even among Trump voters. A month later, Trump tried to cut an informal deal with Planned Parenthood: keep your funding, maybe even increase it, if you stop providing abortions. The women’s health organization rejected the idea. Soon after, the Trump administration’s Obamacare repeal bill was introduced, including a provision to defund Planned Parenthood. That bill failed, but the revised version of the repeal bill, introduced by Republicans this week, contains the same provision and is still awaiting a vote.

Another administration effort to kneecap Planned Parenthood’s funding, however, was more successful. A bill allowing states to withhold Title X family-planning funds from health care providers that offer abortion, like Planned Parenthood, passed both chambers of Congress in February and March. Title X grants help fund nonabortion services such as contraception for low-income women, and more than one-third of the 4 million patients who use Title X each year receive care at Planned Parenthood.

Vice President Mike Pence was essential to that bill’s passage. After two GOP senators voted against the bill, Republicans were forced to whisk in the vice president to cast a tie-breaking Senate vote to advance the legislation. In April, Trump signed the bill into law in a private ceremony, an uncharacteristically publicity-shy moment for a president who has seemed to relish in the public spectacle of his other signings.

State restrictions

Trump’s election greatly emboldened anti-abortion state legislatures to propose measures that restrict women’s access to the medical procedure. His win came months after the Supreme Court ruled last June on the biggest abortion rights case since Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt reaffirmed a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, a ruling that made restricting access through TRAP laws—or Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers—a violation of a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

It was hailed as a massive win for reproductive rights advocates, but Trump’s victory and Republican-dominated statehouses reinvigorated both abortion opponents and abortion rights advocates who collectively have proposed 1,053 state-level provisions regarding women’s reproductive health in 2017. Thus far, 18 abortion restrictions have been enacted at the state level, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights think tank. Twenty-two states have potential legislation on deck to ban abortion in most cases outright—four of these are bans known as “trigger laws,” meaning they would automatically become state law should Roe v. Wade be overturned in the Supreme Court. And despite the Supreme Court ruling just last year, 30 states have introduced TRAP legislation in the hopes that a new justice would tip the scales should another challenge to the constitutionality of those laws arise.

Also trending in anti-abortion state legislatures this year are fetal burial laws, which require tissue extracted from the uterus after an abortion to be buried rather than disposed of as medical waste, creating additional costs and burdens for providers; religious liberty protections for crisis pregnancy centers—in Oklahoma; counseling that relies on anti-scientific information to persuade women that medication abortion can be reversed—in Indiana; personhood bills that endow a fetus or an embryo as a person with full rights under the Constitution—in Iowa and North Carolina; and waiting periods between the initial medical evaluation and the actual abortion procedure—in Colorado. Ohio and Kentucky passed laws banning abortions after 20 weeks, and Pennsylvania and Montana are considering similar bills, as are others.

Weakening Roe v. Wade

Years before running for president, Trump said that, despite his personal dislike of abortion, he was “pro-choice in every respect” and that abortion “is a personal decision that should be left to women and their doctors.” But in recent years, the reality TV star turned politician has said he no longer supports abortion access. During his presidential campaign, Trump’s stance remained anti-abortion with the then-candidate saying that the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that women had a constitutional right to an abortion under the 14th Amendment, “will happen, automatically,” should he be elected and have the chance to appoint justices to the nation’s highest court. In the months after his election, anti-abortion advocates have argued that he will make good on that promise.

But overturning Roe will be a complicated task and is likely one of the hardest goals for Trump to actually achieve. The Supreme Court recently affirmed women’s constitutional right to abortion without undue burden in its Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt decision last June, and it will likely take years before another challenge makes its way to the Supreme Court. For the court to decide to completely overturn Roe, it would need to reject more than four decades of settled precedent.

Still, there are ways that Trump can begin laying the groundwork for overturning the landmark ruling. He has consistently promised to place “pro-life justices on the US Supreme Court,” and while some anti-abortion advocates argued that his pool of potential picks weren’t sufficiently conservative, there is still plenty for them to like about Trump’s first Supreme Court appointment, Neil Gorsuch. Since being appointed to the circuit court by George W. Bush in 2006, Gorsuch has taken conservative stances on reproductive issues—recently he wrote the dissenting opinion in a ruling that blocked Utah from defunding Planned Parenthood.

During his time on the appellate court, Gorsuch ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby’s effort to fight against the Obamacare rule requiring companies to include contraception coverage in their health insurance plans. While Gorsuch is likely to be a strong voice in favor of pro-life advocates, as a successor to Antonin Scalia, he will not drastically shift the balance of the court. But if Anthony Kennedy, a frequent swing vote, or a more liberal justice like Ruth Bader Ginsburg vacates their seat in the next few years, Trump would have an opportunity to move the Supreme Court in a decidedly anti-Roe direction.

States also play a large role in determining what will happen. While the Supreme Court’s newest member adjusts to being on the bench, conservative-led legislatures have remained undaunted in their efforts to get another abortion rights case before the courts. Abortion restrictions, particularly the emergence of bans before fetal viability, have become some of the biggest sources of a potential court challenge. As Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute, said in a recent interview with Mother Jones, some states “are thinking about being the state that overturns Roe v. Wade, and the way to do that is to adopt something like a 6-week abortion ban or a 20-week abortion ban and then send that up through the courts.”

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Trump Brought the War on Women Mainstream in His First 100 Days

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Trump Names Anti-Abortion Activist to Top Health Care Job

by JohnLigertwood6 Posted on April 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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Charmaine Yoest, the former president and CEO of anti-abortion group Americans United for Life, has been tapped to be the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, the White House announced on Friday.

Yoest, a long-time anti-abortion advocate, has helped orchestrate some of the anti-abortion movement’s most significant legislative victories. From 2008 to 2016, Yoest headed AUL, a small but mighty law firm whose goal is to end all abortion in the United States. Under her leadership, AUL helped spur a wave of anti-abortion restrictions around the country, writing model bills and distributing them to state legislatures. In 2011, for instance, 24 of 92 anti-abortion laws passed around the country originated with AUL. Before AUL, Yoest was the vice president for communications at the Family Research Council (another conservative group focused on abortion and family policy), worked on former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s 2008 presidential campaign, and in the Reagan administration.

Read Mother Jones‘ 2012 profile of Americans United for Life.

In 2016, Yoest left AUL to be a senior fellow at American Values, a conservative group focused on “defending life” and traditional values. In 2012, Yoest said that she hopes to help create a “post-Roe nation” and touted the claim that abortion causes breast cancer, despite medical consensus to the contrary. Yoest has also questioned whether contraception access reduces the abortion rate, and told the New York Times that she opposes birth control and believes that IUDs “have life-ending properties.” Under her leadership, AUL did not take a position on birth control. Yoest explained why on PBS in 2011: “It’s really a red herring that the abortion lobby likes to bring up by conflating abortion and birth control.”

As a top communications staffer at HHS, Yoest will be instrumental in shaping the public persona of an agency that oversees a number of programs that enable reproductive healthcare, including contraception. These include Medicaid—which many low-income women use to obtain non-abortion services at Planned Parenthood—and the Title X family planning program, which offers grants to states to help subsidize the cost of non-abortion services such as contraception, cervical cancer screenings, STI testing, and other medical procedures for low-income men and women. Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress have sought to curtail both of these funding streams for reproductive healthcare. Bills to prohibit the use of Medicaid by patients at Planned Parenthood were introduced in both the House and the Senate and are still awaiting a vote. A bill allowing states to withhold Title X family planning funds from health care providers that offer abortion, like Planned Parenthood, was signed into law by Trump this month.

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Trump Names Anti-Abortion Activist to Top Health Care Job

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Paul Ryan Isn’t Even Trying to Pass a Health Care Bill Anymore

by hwahuondekermade Posted on April 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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The LA Times reports that House Republicans have steadfastly refused to reach out to Democrats in an effort to pass their health care bill. This is no surprise. They’re well aware of how they suckered Democrats in 2009, killing months of time in “talks” even though none of them ever planned to support Obamacare. They figure Democrats would do the same to them, and they’re right.

But then we get this:

And senior House Republicans and White House officials have almost completely shut out doctors, hospitals, patient advocates and others who work in the healthcare system, industry officials say, despite pleas from many healthcare leaders to seek an alternative path that doesn’t threaten protections for tens of millions of Americans.

….Health insurers, who initially found House Republicans and Trump administration officials open to suggestions for improving insurance markets, say it is increasingly difficult to have realistic discussions, according to numerous industry officials. “They’re not interested in how health policy actually works,” said one insurance company official, who asked not to be identified discussing conversations with GOP officials. “It’s incredibly frustrating.”

Another longtime healthcare lobbyist, who also did not want to be identified criticizing Republicans, said he’d never seen legislation developed with such disregard for expert input. “It is totally divorced from reality,” he said.

It’s increasingly obvious that Republicans aren’t actually trying to pass a health care bill. They just want to be able to tell their base that they tried. And President Trump wants to erase the taste of defeat from the first health care bill.

If House Republicans were serious, they’d engage with the health care industry. They haven’t. If they were serious they’d care about the CBO score. They don’t. If they were serious they’d be crafting a bill that could pass Senate reconciliation rules. They aren’t even trying. If Senate Republicans were serious they’d be weighing in with a bill of their own. They aren’t wasting their time.

In the beginning, I think Paul Ryan really did want to pass something, mainly so that it would make his tax cut plan easier to pass. But he’s given up on that. At this point he just wants a piece of paper that gets 218 votes and demonstrates that the Republican caucus isn’t hopelessly inept. He knows it will be DOA in the Senate, but at least it will get health care off his plate once and for all. Then he can move on to cutting taxes on the rich, which is what he really cares about. And he’ll have no trouble rounding up votes for that.

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Paul Ryan Isn’t Even Trying to Pass a Health Care Bill Anymore

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