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      ‘Biggest step forward on climate ever’: Biden signs Democrats’ landmark bill

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      ‘Biggest step forward on climate ever’: Biden signs Democrats’ landmark billParty leaders hope approval of Inflation Reduction Act will boost their prospects in the midterm elections this November Joe Biden signed Democrats’ healthcare, climate and tax package on Tuesday, putting the final seal of approval on a landmark bill that party leaders hope will boost their prospects in the midterm elections this November.During a bill-signing ceremony at the White House, the US president celebrated the bill as a historic piece of legislation that would reduce healthcare costs for millions of Americans and help address the climate crisis.“With this law, the American people won and the special interests lost,” Biden said. “Today offers further proof that the soul of America is vibrant, the future of America is bright and the promise of America is real and just beginning.”The signing came four days after the House passed the bill, formally known as the Inflation Reduction Act, in a party-line vote of 220 to 207. The bill had previously passed the Senate in a party-line vote of 51 to 50, with Vice-President Kamala Harris breaking the tie in the evenly divided chamber.The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act capped off more than a year of negotiations among Democrats, after the bill’s predecessor, the Build Back Better Act, stalled in the Senate due to opposition from one of the party’s centrist members, Joe Manchin.The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, spent months quietly negotiating with Manchin over a more narrow spending package, resulting in the Inflation Reduction Act.While the Build Back Better Act was much larger in scope, Democrats have still celebrated the climate and healthcare provisions included in their compromise bill.The law directs $369bn toward investing in renewable energy and reducing America’s planet-heating emissions, marking the country’s most significant effort yet to combat the climate crisis. Experts have estimated the bill could reduce US emissions by about 40% by 2030, compared with 2005 levels, close to Biden’s goal of cutting emissions in half by the end of the decade.“This bill is the biggest step forward on climate ever,” Biden said Tuesday. “It’s going to allow us to boldly take additional steps toward meeting all of my climate goals, the ones we set out when we ran.”In terms of healthcare provisions, the bill will allow Medicare to start negotiating the price of certain expensive drugs and will cap out-of-pocket prescription drug costs at $2,000 a year for those in the government insurance program for seniors and some with disability status. It will also alleviate premium hikes for those who receive insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, the federal program informally known as Obamacare.The cost of the legislation is covered through a series of tax changes, which are expected to bring in hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue for the US government. Those changes include a new corporate minimum tax, a 1% excise tax on stock buybacks and enhanced enforcement from the Internal Revenue Service targeting high-income households.After the House passage of the bill last Friday, Democratic party leaders took to the airwaves to tout the benefits of the legislation, promising that it would help ease the financial burden for Americans struggling under the weight of record-high inflation.“It’s making sure that billionaires in corporate America are paying their fair share, making sure that the tax code is a little bit more fair,” the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told ABC News on Sunday. “When you put it in its totality, you will see that it will lower the deficit, which will help fight inflation.”But Republicans have dismissed Democrats’ arguments that the bill will help ease inflation, accusing them of ramming through a reckless spending spree that will do little to aid working Americans.“[Democrats’] response to the runaway inflation they’ve created is a bill that experts say will not meaningfully cut inflation at all,” the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said earlier this month. “Democrats have proven over and over they simply do not care about middle-class families’ priorities.”According to a report issued by Moody’s Analytics, Democrats’ spending package will “modestly reduce inflation over the 10-year budget horizon”. But regardless of the bill’s impact, there have been some signs that inflation may be cooling off.US inflation hit an annual rate of 8.5% last month, which represented a slight decrease from the 40-year high of 9.1% recorded in June. If inflation does indeed start to taper off and Democrats can sell the passage of their spending package on the campaign trail, it could help them prevent widespread losses in the midterm elections this November.“I’ve been prepared to win the midterms all along. It depends on getting out the vote. This probably could be helpful,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said of the bill’s passage last week. “But I do know it will be helpful to America’s working families, and that’s our purpose.”TopicsJoe BidenUS politicsUS domestic policyClimate crisisUS healthcarenewsReuse this content More

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      Inflation Reduction Act will be ‘life-changing’ for Black and Latino seniors

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      Inflation Reduction Act will be ‘life-changing’ for Black and Latino seniorsMillions of Americans could benefit from provisions in the bill that reduce prescription drug costs, experts say Millions of older American could benefit from provisions in the new climate and healthcare spending package that lower prescription drug costs. For Black and Latino seniors, who disproportionately suffer from chronic diseases and struggle with high costs, the package, if passed and signed by Joe Biden, could be especially life-changing.The Inflation Reduction Act, which the US House is expected to pass on Friday, would give Medicare the power to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies for up to 10 drugs starting in 2026. But other provisions could make the annual out-of-pocket costs for US seniors more affordable, which could disproportionately help low-income Americans and Black and Latino seniors on Medicare, who are up to twice as likely to struggle with paying for medication as white Americans.“This is a population that’s more likely to live with certain diseases that are often treated with expensive medications. It’s also a population with relatively limited income and assets,” says Tricia Neuman, executive director of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Program on Medicare Policy. “It’s a double whammy that makes Black and Latino beneficiaries more vulnerable but also puts them in a place where they’re likely to be helped by the provisions.”The legislative package, lauded for its sweeping $369bn investment toward addressing climate change, would include a $2,000 annual cap on drug costs for seniors and a monthly cap of $35 for insulin. The spending bill would also eliminate the cost of vaccines for seniors and a three-year extension of federal subsidies for lower-income Americans who buy private insurance through the Affordable Care Act, helping up to 15 million Americans.“When a patient has several different conditions that they come into the office to see us with, $2,000 can be what they pay for a month for their medications, $2,000 can be what some patients pay for for a single prescription,” Utibe Essien, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied prescription drug inequity, said. “To limit that to the annual cost of prescriptions is going to be life-changing for a lot of patients and their families.”While the healthcare provisions will impact older Americans on Medicare nationwide, the reality is that the burden of high prescription drug costs falls unevenly on Black and Latino Americans, who are more likely to work in lower-paying jobs with fewer retirement benefits, earn less income and hold less savings than their white peers. At the same time, in a country where people pay more than twice as much for prescription drugs as other countries, Black and Latino Medicare beneficiaries “are more likely to report being in relatively poor health, have higher prevalence rates of some chronic conditions, such as hypertension and diabetes than white beneficiaries”, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis in 2021.The combination of disparate suffering and the struggle to afford the significant costs to address that suffering, in turn, forces Black and Latino seniors into a devastating dilemma.KFF researchers found that the median income per capita for white seniors on Medicare was double that of Latinos and one and a half times that of Black Americans. What’s more, researchers found that white Medicare beneficiaries overall held a median savings per capita of more than $117,000, more than eight times that of Black beneficiaries and a staggering 12 times that of Latinos.Under the bill, a $2,000 annual cap on out-of-pocket drug expenses would go into effect in 2025. Currently, in an environment where there is no limit on costs, 1.4 million seniors on Medicare spent more than $2,000 on prescription drug costs in 2020, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.What’s more, the monthly cap on insulin, which goes into effect next year, would aid the more than 3 million Medicare beneficiaries who use insulin. But the disparities go beyond: nearly half of Black and Latino seniors on Medicare reported having diabetes, compared to less than a third of white beneficiaries. And while more than 3 million seniors covered by Medicare struggled to afford medications in 2019, Black and Latino seniors were nearly twice as likely to report not getting their necessary prescriptions because of costs than white seniors.Essien says that the bill will reduce the costs that drive health disparities among seniors. Yet, for some provisions, its true impact may not be felt for years: Medicare negotiation of drug prices, for instance, fully goes into effect in 2026 and will be limited to 10 drugs to start. What’s more, the cap on monthly insulin costs leaves out those who are covered by private insurance.Though the bill focuses on reducing healthcare costs, it fails to address the underlying causes of racial health disparities such as people’s unequal access to pharmaceutical care and the biases Black and Latino patients face within the medical system. Essien hopes the savings from drug costs in the bill would “allow us to start to address some of these fundamental root causes of health inequities in our country”.“We must applaud this bill because it is going to reduce costs of drugs for millions of Americans each year, specifically for older Americans,” he says. “Why these disparities exist is what we have to get to the bottom of. A bill that reduces medication costs isn’t necessarily alone going to address that.”TopicsUS politicsUS healthcarenewsReuse this content More

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      Joe Biden hails Senate deal as ‘most significant’ US climate legislation ever

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      Joe Biden hails Senate deal as ‘most significant’ US climate legislation everProposal backed by centrist senator Joe Manchin also addresses healthcare, tax rises for high earners and cutting federal debt Joe Biden has hailed a congressional deal that represents the biggest single climate investment in US history – and hands him a badly needed political victory.In a stunning reversal, Senate Democrats on Wednesday announced an expansive $739bn package that had eluded them for months addressing healthcare and the climate crisis, raising taxes on high earners and corporations and reducing federal debt.What’s in the climate bill that Joe Manchin supports – and what isn’t Read moreThe president said on Thursday: “This bill would be the most signification legislation in history to tackle the climate crisis and improve our energy security right away.”Biden, who has faced soaring gas prices that have helped drive inflation to 40-year highs, said experts agreed that the bill would help address the problem and urged Congress to pass it.“With this legislation, we’re facing up to some of our biggest problems and we’re taking a giant step forward as a nation … This bill is far from perfect, it’s a compromise, but that’s often how progress is made: by compromises.”The deal, struck between the majority leader, Chuck Schumer, and longtime holdout Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, would invest $369bn over the decade in climate change-fighting strategies including investments in renewable energy production and tax rebates for consumers to buy new or used electric vehicles.It includes $60bn for a clean energy manufacturing tax credit and $30bn for a production tax credit for wind and solar, seen as ways to boost and support the industries that can help curb the country’s dependence on fossil fuels. At Manchin’s insistence, $306bn is earmarked for debt reduction.The package, called the Inflation Reduction Act, would cut US emissions 40% by 2030, a summary released by Schumer’s office said, and earned praise from clean-energy advocates and Democratic party elders.Barack Obama, the former president, tweeted: “I’m grateful to President Biden and those in Congress – Democrat or Republican – who are working to deliver for the American people. Progress doesn’t always happen all at once, but it does happen – and this is what it looks like.”Al Gore, an ex-vice-president whose 2006 documentary film An Inconvenient Truth helped raise awareness of the climate crisis, wrote on Twitter: “The Inflation Reduction Act has the potential to be a historic turning point. It represents the single largest investment in climate solutions & environmental justice in US history. Decades of tireless work by climate advocates across the country led to this moment.”Another component of the package would allow Medicare, the government-run healthcare programme for the elderly and disabled, to negotiate prescription drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, saving the federal government $288bn over the 10-year budget window.The Manchin-Schumer measure is substantially smaller than the $3.5tn Build Back Better spending bill that Biden asked Democrats to push through Congress last year.But it gave him a political win when he most needed it. His administration has been assailed by a cascade of setbacks including the war in Ukraine, a series of conservative supreme court rulings, soaring inflation and, on Thursday, a GDP report that showed gross domestic product shrank for the second consecutive quarter this year.This backdrop has left the president struggling with low job approval ratings and ebbing support from his own party. A CNN poll this week found that 75% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters want the party to nominate someone other than him in the 2024 election.But the surprise Senate deal, coming on the same day that the Senate passed legislation boosting domestic production of computer chips and Biden completed his recovery from a coronavirus infection, gave a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel.John Zogby, an author and pollster, said there had already been signs that the president’s approval rating was improving. “This could very well be the critical win. First of all, it’s coming in the context of a few other wins: the manufacturing bill is another and, at the same time, there’s a sense the gas prices are going down. It’s an important piece of Build Back Better and it looks like it can happen. This could lift expectations.”The deal is a boost for Democrats ahead of midterm elections on 8 November that will determine control of Congress. Zogby added: “Democrats can go back to voters and say, ‘Look, we accomplished something. It may not have been what you wanted but here’s our first real accomplishment on climate change.’”Jonathan Kott, a former communications director for Manchin, told the MSNBC network: “Democrats really need to seize on this moment and tell this story, scream it at the top of their lungs. If this was Donald Trump, he’d be out there having press conferences in the Rose Garden all over the country. We should be doing the same thing.”The deal marked a dramatic U-turn by Manchin, a conservative Democrat and the swing vote in the evenly divided Senate, who has received more donations from oil and gas companies than any other legislator in recent years. Earlier this month he drew fierce condemnation from climate activists for apparently scuttling Biden’s spending plans, claiming that he was concerned about inflation.On Wednesday Manchin, who aimed to preserve federal oil and gas leasing projects and natural gas pipelines during months of talks, said the bill will invest in hydrogen, nuclear power, renewables, fossil fuels and energy storage. “This bill does not arbitrarily shut off our abundant fossil fuels.”Democrats hope to pass the bill by a simple majority in the Senate. Schumer told colleagues on Thursday that they now have an opportunity to achieve two “hugely important” priorities on healthcare and climate change, the Associated Press reported, but warned that final passage will be hard.It remains unclear whether Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who like Manchin has been a perennial thorn in Biden’s side, will vote in favour. There is also sure to be staunch opposition from Republicans.Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said in a statement the legislation would be “devastating to American families and small businesses. Raising taxes on job creators, crushing energy producers with new regulations, and stifling innovators looking for new cures will only make this recession worse, not better.”The bill must also pass the House of Representatives, where Democrats have a razor-thin majority, and be signed by Biden.TopicsUS domestic policyUS politicsJoe BidenJoe ManchinUS SenateClimate crisisUS healthcarenewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Lives are at stake’: hacking of US hospitals highlights deadly risk of ransomware

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      ‘Lives are at stake’: hacking of US hospitals highlights deadly risk of ransomwareThe number of ransomware attacks on US healthcare organizations increased 94% from 2021 to 2022, according to one report Last week, the US government warned that hospitals across the US have been targeted by an aggressive ransomware campaign originating from North Korea since 2021. Ransomware hacks, in which attackers encrypt computer networks and demand payment to make them functional again, have been a growing concern for both the private and public sector since the 90s. But they can be particularly devastating in the healthcare industry, where even minutes of down time can have deadly consequences, and have become ominously frequent.The number of ransomware attacks on healthcare organizations increased 94% from 2021 to 2022, according to a report from the cybersecurity firm Sophos. More than two-thirds of healthcare organizations in the US said they had experienced a ransomware attack in 2021, the study said, up from 34% in 2020.Ransomware attacks on healthcare are particularly common in the US, with 41% of such attacks globally having been carried out against US-based firms in 2021.“The current outlook is terrible,” said Israel Barak, CISO of Cybereason. “We are seeing the industry experience an extremely sharp increase in both the quantity and level of sophistication of these attacks.”Ransomware hacks have caused major healthcare disruptions, including delayed chemotherapy treatments and ambulances being diverted from a San Diego emergency room after computer systems were frozen. In 2021, a lawsuit filed by the mother of a baby who died in Alabama alleged the first “death by ransomware”, blaming a 2019 hack of a hospital for fatal brain damage of the newborn after heart rate monitors failed.‘We are not ready’: a cyber expert on US vulnerability to a Russian attackRead moreThe possibly devastating consequences for medical facilities may be one of the reasons hackers have identified them as a high-profile target. “The North Korean state-sponsored cyber actors likely assume healthcare organizations are willing to pay ransoms because these organizations provide services that are critical to human life and health,” said the advisory from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).CISA and others advise hospitals against paying ransoms, but providers often feel they have no choice, said Barak. In 2021, 61% of healthcare organizations that suffered a ransomware attack paid the ransom – the highest percentage of any industry sector.“When lives are at stake, it makes the decision very easy,” Barak said. “These attackers have identified medical organizations as very, very good targets because they are more likely to pay.”Attacks are typically carried out by private groups of criminals, experts say: in the third quarter of 2021, 30% of ransomware attacks on healthcare entities were carried out by Conti, a crime syndicate thought to be based in Russia, according to an industry report from cybersecurity firm BreachQuest.But the North Korea incident revealed last week is just the latest state actor to orchestrate ransomware attacks on health care organizations after the FBI revealed in June it had thwarted an attack from Iran on a Boston Children’s hospital.Underfunded hospitals hit by Covid squeezeThe healthcare industry has been hit by a perfect storm of factors that have escalated the ransomware problem, experts say: patient information is increasingly being digitized as hospitals struggle with small internet security budgets.In 2009, the Obama administration passed a bill requiring all public and private healthcare providers to adopt electronic medical records by 2014, resulting in a massive migration of paper patient records to online systems. But today, just 4-7% of the average healthcare provider’s annual IT budget is focused on cybersecurity, the BreachQuest study said.“Healthcare providers have gone through massive digital transformation in a very short amount of time,” said Hank Schless, senior security expert at the cybersecurity firm Lookout.The move was accelerated by the pandemic, he added, as more providers shifted to telehealth to connect with patients during lockdown and hospital staff were stretched thin by the influx of sick and dying patients.CISA has advised a “3-2-1 backup approach” for healthcare entities, including saving three copies of each type of data in two different formats, including one offline. But the agency’s advisory to hospitals is “somewhat unhelpful”, said Vincent Berk, chief security officer at the cybersecurity firm Quantum Xchange, offering generic recommendations about securing data with little clear path to doing so.“The issue with this attack, and any other ransomware attack, is that the cure doesn’t really exist,” he said. “In other words, if it happens, it is already too late.”Legislators are attempting to fill in those gaps. In May, Senator Patty Murray of Washington led a hearing on strengthening cybersecurity in the healthcare and education sectors, saying that the US “needs to address cybersecurity attacks and ensure they are treated like the national security threat they are”.“These kinds of challenges don’t just cause major headaches, lawsuits, and expenses for hospitals,” she said. “They put patients in danger. They undermine our national security. And in some cases they even cost lives.”In March 2022 the Senate introduced a bipartisan bill called the Healthcare Cybersecurity Act, which would direct CISA and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to collaborate on a plan to bolster cybersecurity measures among healthcare and public health organizations.Those measures would include cybersecurity training to employees of health organizations and authorize studies from CISA to identify risks in the industry. It is unclear when the bill is set for a vote, but experts say such legislation is more urgent than ever.“There’s zero deterrence right now,” Barak said. “Until we find a more effective way to tackle this issue, I am afraid the outlook is not looking good.”TopicsHackingHealthcare industryData and computer securityCybercrimeUS politicsUS healthcarenewsReuse this content More

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      Under the Skin review: US healthcare, racism and a terrible toll taken

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      Under the Skin review: US healthcare, racism and a terrible toll takenLinda Villarosa paints a horrifying picture of embedded inequality and prejudice, yet still finds hope for the future Persistence, intelligence, a fierce devotion to the facts and an easy capacity for outrage. These are the building blocks of great journalism and they are the virtues that have made Linda Villarosa one of our most important activist-journalist-authors for several decades.A Way Out of No Way review: Raphael Warnock, symbol of hope for AmericaRead moreHer latest book, subtitled “The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of our Nation”, is a culmination of her important work going back to 1986, when her story Nobody’s Safe in Essence was the first article about HIV/Aids published in an ethnic magazine.That piece marked the moment Villarosa realized “that these kinds of stories would be my life’s work”. Americans have been benefiting from her persistence and intelligence ever since.Her new book tells a horrifying story about all the reasons Black Americans have been mistreated by doctors for centuries, beginning with the idea propagated under the transatlantic slave trade that Black men had a “primitive psychological organization” that made them “uniquely fitted for bondage”.Dr Samuel Cartwright of New Orleans went so far as to assert that the desire to escape was itself proof of a mental illness.It has been common knowledge for centuries that Black people suffer worse health outcomes than whites in America. But American racism has been so virulent for so long, it took even Villarosa many years to reject the idea that poor choices by Black people were the main reason for their misfortune.She writes: “As recently as 2016, a survey of 22 white medical students and residents … showed that half of them endorsed at least one myth about physiological differences between Black people and white people, including that Black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than whites.”When asked to imagine how much pain white or Black people experienced from getting their hands slammed in a car door, the students “insisted that Black people felt less pain, which made the providers less likely to recommend appropriate treatment”.The proven facts are appalling: the racial disparity in infant mortality is “actually greater in the present day than in 1850, when Black women were human chattel”. African Americans aged 18 to 49 “are twice as likely to die from heart disease”. Black infants are more than twice as likely as white babies to die before their first birthday.Like the white medical establishment, Villarosa assumed poverty had to be a key factor in these statistics. But as researchers became more sophisticated, they discovered that “babies of more educated, higher-income Black parents were still more likely to be born small compared to their white counterparts”.In 1997, researchers developed nine questions to determine scientifically how much racism an individual has been subjected to, ranging from “people act as if they think you are not smart” to “people act as if they think you are dishonest”.What the data proved was that while socio-economic status and education are relevant, “the lived experience of being Black in America regardless of income and education, also affects health”.One proof came from a 1997 study comparing the birth weights of children from US-born Black people with the babies of African-born Black people and US-born whites.“The infants of the immigrant women from Africa closely matched in size to the white, not the Black, US-born babies. In other words, despite the disadvantages they experienced by being brought up in poorer countries, “their newborns were larger and more likely to be fuller term than babies born to African American women”.And then, “the grandchildren of the Caribbean and African immigrant women were born smaller than their mothers had been at birth”.As a super high-achiever with access to excellent health, Villarosa was shocked when she herself had a baby with below-average body weight.Some of the most depressing parts of the book are the stories about the persistence of racism at elite American institutions like Stanford University, where a talented Black pre-med female student was routinely dismissed by white classmates who assumed she was only there because of affirmative action.The same student said her four-year residency starting in 2002 was “a toxic mix” of racism and sexism.“If you were a woman who wasn’t traditionally feminine” or “a person of color … the mainly older white men who ran the residency treated you horribly.”And yet Villarosa remains resolutely optimistic. When part of this book was first published in a different version in the New York Times Magazine, under the title Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis, in 2018, she was thrilled when the then governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, responded with a pilot program to expand Medicaid coverage for birth doulas, “citing the need to target racial disparities in maternal mortality”.And even when the Covid epidemic arrived as she was writing this book, confirming her essential thesis about the inequitable treatment of Black people by the American healthcare system, Villarosa remained hopeful.She writes: “Together, America’s racial reckoning and a pandemic that has exposed long-standing racial health inequality have thrown an accelerant on a slow-burning fire of awareness, forcing America to grapple with issues of race and justice.”Villarosa’s unquenchable faith in the power of journalism makes her a worthy successor to another famous muckraker, Ida B Wells, whose fearless journalism focused a nation’s attention on the horrors of lynching more than a century ago.This book uses the same kind of ferocity to attack the persistent racism that infects the healthcare system in America.
      Under the Skin: the Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation is published in the US by Doubleday Books
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      Kentucky and Idaho measures severely restricting abortions are halted

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      Kentucky and Idaho measures severely restricting abortions are haltedMeasures’ constitutionality brought into question amid flurry of abortion restrictions passed in US states

      Opinion: these are the final days of US reproductive freedom
      Two measures that severely restrict abortions were halted on Friday, one by Kentucky’s governor and a second by Idaho’s supreme court.In Kentucky, Democratic governor Andy Beshear vetoed a Republican-priority bill on Friday that would ban abortions in the state after 15 weeks of pregnancy and regulate the dispensing of abortion pills.Mail-order abortion pills become next US reproductive rights battlegroundRead moreThe governor raised doubts about the constitutionality of the proposed legislation and criticized it for not including exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest. Kentucky law currently bans abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.Idaho’s supreme court delivered a late decision Friday afternoon halting a law – modeled after a similar abortion ban in Texas – that would allow family members of an aborted fetus to sue doctors who perform a procedure after six weeks of pregnancy for a minimum of $20,000.Chief justice Richard Bevan said in court documents that the court stayed the law, which was scheduled to go into effect on 22 April, to give state attorneys more time to address a legal challenge from Planned Parenthood. State attorneys have until 28 April to address the lawsuit.In a statement, Rebecca Gibron, interim chief executive of Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawaii, Alaska, Indiana and Kentucky, said: “Patients across Idaho can breathe a sigh of relief tonight”. Gibron said abortions can continue in Idaho’s three Planned Parenthood locations.While Idaho’s governor Brad Little signed the ban into law 23 March, he said he had reservations about the civilian enforcement measures of the ban, saying that it could prove itself to be “unconstitutional and unwise”. If deemed constitutional, Little said that states “hostile” to the first and second amendments could use similar methods against religious freedom and gun rights.The block on Idaho’s law could be temporary. If the court allows it to pass, it would be just the latest of a slate of Republican-led states that have passed abortion restrictions over the last three years. Abortion bans have been seen across several states, including Arkansas, Arizona, Montana, Texas and Alabama. Most recently, Oklahoma lawmakers passed a bill this week that makes performing an abortion a felony punishable by 10 years in prison and with a $100,000 fine.Meanwhile, state lawmakers in Kentucky will have a chance to override the governor’s veto when they reconvene next week for the final two days of this year’s 60-day legislative session. The abortion measure won overwhelming support in the Republica-dominated legislature.Kentucky’s proposed 15-week ban is modeled after a Mississippi law under review by the US supreme court in a case that could dramatically limit abortion rights. By taking the pre-emptive action, the bill’s supporters say that Kentucky’s stricter ban would be in place if the Mississippi law is upheld.Republicans have already sharply criticized Beshear’s veto on the legislature’s abortion ban, with state GOP spokesperson Sean Southard saying on Friday that the governor’s veto was “the latest action in his ideological war on the conservative values held by Kentuckians”. The bill will probably surface as an issue again next year when Beshear runs for a second term in Republican-trending Kentucky.Beshear condemned the bill for failing to exclude pregnancies caused by rape or incest.“Rape and incest are violent crimes,” the governor said in his veto message on Friday. “Victims of these crimes should have options, not be further scarred through a process that exposes them to more harm from their rapists or that treats them like offenders themselves.”The governor said the bill would make it harder for girls under 18 to end a pregnancy without notifying both parents. As an example, he said that a girl impregnated by her father would have to notify him of her intent to get an abortion.Beshear, a former state attorney general, also said the bill was “likely unconstitutional”, noting that the US supreme court struck down similar laws elsewhere. He pointed to provisions in the Kentucky bill requiring doctors performing nonsurgical procedures to maintain hospital admitting privileges in “geographical proximity” to where the procedures are performed.“The supreme court has ruled such requirements unconstitutional as it makes it impossible for women, including a child who is a victim of rape or incest, to obtain a procedure in certain areas of the state,” the governor said.TopicsAbortionKentuckyUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansUS healthcareUS domestic policynewsReuse this content More