The Administration’s decision to require Catholic charities and universities to provide free birth control through employee health coverage is several weeks old, but the maelstrom of dissent it’s created is widening. Republicans, who charge that the measure violates such organizations’ religious freedoms, have allied with Catholic groups in opposition, and in recent days a handful of high-profile Democrats have joined their ranks in calling on the Administration to broaden exemptions from the rule.
When the history of Facebook-enabled activism is written, the backlash against the Susan G. Komen foundation’s decision to end grants to Planned Parenthood clinics will fall somewhere behind the Arab Spring and ahead of the effort to get Betty White to host Saturday Night Live. The Betty White campaign took months; the Komen foundation reversed [...]
Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States, spoke with TIME’s Rick Stengel about his new book, Back to Work, and how to fix the economy. Excerpts from that conversation follow.
Michele Bachmann, in what appears to be a broadcast from her local public access studio, coins the term in reference to Rick Perry’s executive order mandating the HPV vaccine for teenage girls. (No mention of the uninsured rate in Texas).
A three-judge appellate panel in Atlanta on Friday ruled a key pillar of the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s 2010 health care reform law, unconstitutional. In a lengthy opinion, two judges, one appointed by President Bill Clinton and one by George H.W. Bush sided with 26 states that argued that the individual health insurance mandate violates [...]
Updated at 3:20 p.m. The Affordable Care Act was back in court on Wednesday, with the government and a coalition of 26 states presenting arguments in an Atlanta courtroom for and against the constitutionality of the law. Oral arguments lasted longer than expected, but observers left the courthouse today with little indication of how the [...]
The conventional wisdom among the political punditry is that 2012 Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney will be hamstrung by the health-insurance plan he helped craft as governor of Massachusetts, which included a mandate to purchase insurance. That may not be true. In conservative circles, the health-insurance mandate has become shorthand for government overreach. But while each [...]
Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich is quickly developing a serious health reform problem and his defense sounds just like Mitt Romney’s.
As Washington debates Medicare, taxes, deficits and the future of the budget, it’s become a cliché to say that Americans like big government but don’t like to pay for it. Most clichés are true. And as the swollen Mississippi River barrels south toward New Orleans, you can see a stark example of that in the [...]
The 2012 Republican presidential nomination will not be won or lost on newspaper op-ed pages, or in the wood-paneled confines of a university classroom, where Mitt Romney spoke Thursday about health care. But that is where the field’s current front runner has been running his campaign so far. He didn’t show up at the first [...]
