Healthcare

Rubio said the Obama administration's move to require birth-control coverage forces religious organizations to abandon their beliefs.

House Republicans proposed three bills that would restrict abortion rights, doing so Monday, the 39th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision granting those rights to women.

The bills also coincided with Monday's March for Life, in which thousands of anti-abortion-rights activists held a rally in Washington.

House Republicans returned this week with their sights on terminating a part of the 2010 healthcare law the Obama administration has acknowledged is unworkable.

The House Ways & Means Committee this week will mark up H.R. 1173, the Fiscal Responsibility and Retirement Security Act. That bill repeals the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) program, a voluntary long-term healthcare program.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), responding to attacks from his Republican opponent for the 2012 elections on Tuesday, defending votes he cast for some of President Obama's least popular policies.

Tester conceded, for example, that Obama's 2010 healthcare reform law was not perfect, but said there was real need among Montanans for at least some of its provisions.

"There are far, far, far too many folks out there who didn't have access to health care because they couldn't afford insurance," Tester said in the interview with the Helena Independent Record on Tuesday. "No, we haven't seen that [health care] cost curve bent downward yet, but the law is not fully implemented yet."

Rep. Jeff Flake and former Rep. Butch Otter said Gingrich urged members to vote for the 2003 prescription drug bill.

Four House Democrats on Wednesday introduced legislation that would create a new tax credit for people who spend money on infertility treatment.

The Family Act of 2011, H.R. 3522, argues that coverage for infertility in the U.S. is sparse, and that only eight states have approved laws requiring infertility treatments to be covered in health plans.

A handful of House Democrats have put forward their own proposal to spare Medicare after the supercommittee's failure.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday introduced legislation that would make it a crime under U.S. law to take young girls out of the U.S. for the purpose of genital mutilation.

Reid's bill, the Girls' Protection Act, follows up on the successful passage of another Reid bill in 1996 that criminalizes this procedure in the U.S. on girls under the age of 18. But he said that law has what he called a "vacation loophole" that allows female genital mutilation, or FGM, to take place on U.S. girls when they are out of the country.

Dozens of House Democrats on Friday proposed legislation that would extend federal employee benefits programs to the gay and lesbian domestic partners of federal workers, which would give retirement and other benefits to these domestic partners in the same way that spouses now receive them.

"The federal government must set an example as an equal opportunity employer," sponsor Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) said. "If we are to treat all federal employees fairly and recruit the best and the brightest to serve in government, we need this legislation."

House Democrats on Thursday condemned a 2012 spending bill — which also includes a continuing resolution allowing the government to operate through Dec. 16 — for containing several policy riders they say have no place in the bill.

One of these riders would block funding for any rule under the Department of Agriculture (USDA) that does not allow tomato paste used on pizza to be considered a vegetable. Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) said this language essentially allows school lunch programs to treat pizza as a serving of vegetables.

“This language equates pizza with vegetables and weakens otherwise good school-nutrition standards,” Polis said. “This false equivalency harkens back to the ludicrous labeling of ketchup as a vegetable, made infamous 30 years ago by President Ronald Reagan.”