From time to time, Republican Party leaders are forced to remind their candidates that they are living in the 21st century. In early 2008, the GOP got diversity training in preparation for campaigning against Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, including the guidance "you can't allow the party to be Macaca-ed." After the likes of Todd […]

At an event this week at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics, 2016 White House hopeful Rand Paul came face to face with the inescapable conundrum for any Republican seeking the presidency. Hoping to secure the nomination of a party whose platform calls for a "human life amendment" banning abortion even in case of […]

The Supreme Court on Tuesday will hold oral arguments in two cases (Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius) challenging the Affordable Care Act's requirement that insurance plans cover contraception. But with the Court's precedents and the legislative history of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) seemingly in the […]

This week brought news of a vitally important medical development for millions of future parents. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that a new fetal DNA test is far more accurate and much less risky than current methods at identifying--and ruling out--serious genetic disorders including Down syndrome and Trisomy 18. […]

In the upside-down world of Republican anti-abortion extremists, accepted medical standards constitute malpractice while lying to patients does not. That's inescapable conclusion from the latest torrent of draconian abortion restrictions now pouring out of GOP-controlled state legislatures. While Kansas has banned lawsuits by parents against physicians who refused to inform them of catastrophic fetal disorders, […]

The state of Georgia this week began offering a new version of its vehicle license plate featuring the Confederate battle flag. Sponsored by the Georgia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (to whom a portion of the purchase price and annual registration fees will go), the revised design has many people inside the state […]

"The doctor-patient relationship." For over 20 years, conservative propagandists and their Republican allies have used that four-word bludgeon to beat back universal health care reform. In 1994, GOP strategist Bill Kristol warned that "the Clinton Plan is damaging to the quality of American medicine and to the relationship between the patient and the doctor." Kristol's […]

For the first time since its passage of draconian curbs on the state's abortion clinics, Texas stripped the medical license of a physician for failing to obtain admitting hospital admitting privileges. With a third of the state's clinics already shuttered due to the TRAP law which went into effect on November 1, 2013, access to […]

Long before he became America's preeminent conservative columnist, Charles Krauthammer was a practicing physician in Boston. Now, the psychiatrist turned commentator is offering a prescription for his Republican Party suffering from the blowback of its war on women. The antidote to the yawning gender gap expanded by GOP proclamations about "legitimate rape" and other "gifts […]