About 800 registered nurses are striking today in Oakland over a contract dispute that centers on healthcare benefits. 

The nurses at Children's Hospital Oakland say the facility is pushing higher cost-sharing requirements — up to $4,000 annually — on RNs at the same time the hospital is paying out millions of dollars in administrative salaries.

“Generations of nurses worked hard to win the standards we have today, especially here at Children’s Hospital,” RN Anna Smith, one of the nurse negotiators, said in a statement. “My generation is not going to lead the way turning the clock back. Hands off our healthcare.”

The nurses, who plan a three-day strike, have been working without a contract since mid-July.

For its part, Children's Hospital defended the benefit cuts, arguing the tough economy is forcing its hand.  

"We're having an economic downturn all over the country and health costs are escalating all over," Children's spokeswoman Erin Goldsmith told The San Francisco Chronicle. "We feel the union leadership is out of touch with the economic environment."

The average RN salary at the hospital is $136,000, Goldsmith told the Chronicle.

The CNA has another take. The union said the hospital spent $8.9 million in 2008 on salaries and other compensation for the top 26 top administrators — a figure that includes social club memberships.

“Cutting health benefits for nurses, other hospital workers and our families is an unfair and unnecessary way for the hospital to make up for years of bad management,” said Martha Kuhl, a nurse at Children's Hospital and treasurer of the California Nurses Association (CNA), which organized the strike.

The raging debate over whether healthcare reform's costs are a factor in the sale of three Scranton-area Catholic hospitals cranked up a notch Tuesday morning when the law's opponents starting running ads.

CatholicVote.org's radio spots coincide with Vice President Joe Biden's visit to the area, where he lived until he was 10. The issue is politically volatile because the area's Democratic congressmen — Chris Carney and Paul Kanjorski, both of whom are Catholic — are in tight reelection races and voted for the law.

"Three Catholic hospitals right here in northeast Pennsylvania are calling it quits and are now up for sale," the ad says. "The reason? Obamacare."

Nearly three-quarters of voters support a move to require insurers to cover prescription contraceptives without charging patients, according to poll results released Tuesday.

Women's healthcare advocates are seizing on the results to bolster efforts to include those services as part of the mandatory preventive-care section of the new healthcare reform law.

Seventy-one percent of respondents said insurance companies should provide full coverage for birth control pills and other methods of prescription contraception, according to the survey. More than a third of female voters (34 percent) said they've struggled with birth control costs at some point in their lives, the poll found.

The poll, conducted by Hart Research Associates, was commissioned by the Planned Parenthood Action Fund (PPAF), an abortion rights group.

"We see too many women choosing between birth control and basics like rent, tuition and childcare," PPAF President Cecile Richards said in a statement. "Because our country leads the industrialized world in unintended and teen pregnancy, prescription birth control must be made available at no cost.” She also said “Making birth control available at no cost makes it possible for women to use the method that works best for them and will reduce the number of unintended pregnancies in America."

The new healthcare reform law requires companies to cover some preventive care for women without charging co-pays — treatments including mammograms and screenings for cervical cancer, anemia and osteoporosis (among other conditions). Contraceptives are not among the mandatory services specified, thought the list is not yet comprehensive. Instead, Congress charged the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) with compiling a complete list of covered services by Aug. 2011.

Among the other key poll findings:

• Sixty percent of male voters and 81 percent of female voters want HHS to include birth control prescriptions on its list of required preventive care services. 

• This includes 72 percent of Republican women and 77 percent of Catholic women, the pollsters found.

• Young women struggle disproportionately with birth control costs. Of women aged 18-34, 55 percent said they've had trouble paying for their contraceptives. 

The findings were based on a survey of 1,147 voters conducted over the summer.

House Republicans say healthcare groups that backed the Democrats’ overhaul are trying to re-establish ties to the GOP.

Campaign season normally isn't the time for nuanced positions on healthcare policy. But no one told Alexi Giannoulias. 

The Democrat vying to fill the Illinois Senate seat vacated by President Obama said this week that he wants to allow the government to negotiate drug prices on behalf of the nation's Medicare beneficiaries — a "missed opportunity," he said, in the Democrats' new healthcare law.   

"There's a lot more to be done," Giannoulias told David Gregory Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." 

"I would have loved to have seen a provision there to let the Secretary of Health and Human Services negotiate … drug rates for Medicare the way that the [Veterans Affairs Department] does."

As part of the 2003 law creating Medicare's prescription drug benefit, Republican leaders explicitly prohibited HHS from using the bulk-purchasing power of Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices for seniors and taxpayers. 

Several attempts to eliminate the prohibition have failed since Part D took effect in 2006, and the $80 billion deal cut last year between Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and the pharmaceutical lobby undermined any real effort to include the change in the healthcare reform bill.

Rep. Mark Kirk (Ill.), the Republican vying for Obama's Senate seat, said he wants to repeal the healthcare law and replace it with alternative reforms, including provisions to rein in malpractice suits and allow consumers to buy insurance across state lines.   

Giannoulias was quick to defend the reform bill overall, arguing that the coverage expansion and consumer protections central to the law are long overdue. 

"Morally we shouldn't have 51 million Americans without affordable, basic health care," he said. 

An Oregon Republican running for the House recently compared the Democrats' healthcare reform bill to the Fugitive Slave Act.

Republican Scott Bruun, who is challenging freshman Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), told a crowd in Canby, Ore., during an Oct. 7 speech that the healthcare bill was "right up there" with the infamous slave act.

The bill, passed in 1850, required any runaway slaves who had escaped their bondage and were living free in the Northern states be returned to their owners.

"I would argue that from a fiscal perspective, it's probably the worst piece of legislation this nation's ever passed," Bruun said during a speech that was recorded by a Democratic campaign tracker.

The audience clapped its approval, but then Bruun continued.

"From a social perspective, it's right up there, I would argue — probably the fugitive slave law was worse," he added. "But still, the healthcare bill was pretty darn bad."

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) warned Monday that Democrats should expect no funding to implement their new healthcare reform law if Republicans win the House in November.

“They’re going to need money from us to hire those 22,000 federal employees we think it’s going to take to run this monstrosity," Boehner told voters in West Palm Beach Monday, according to The Palm Beach Post. "And I’ll just tell you, they’re not going to get a dime from us.”

Boehner acknowledged that an outright repeal of the healthcare law — a key rallying point of many GOP campaigns this year — is unlikely with President Obama wielding veto power from the White House. Still, the funding for many of the reforms will require approval from the House as part of the annual budget process. If Republicans control the chamber, Boehner warned, Democrats shouldn't hold their breath for the money.

“Our job is to do everything we can to keep it from being implemented, to keep it from moving ahead," he said. 

Boehner also predicted that the fight over the healthcare law won't end with November's midterms. If Republicans are successful blocking parts of the law from taking effect in the near-term, he said, "this will become the number one issue in the presidential election of 2012, when the American people can decide more directly."

Boehner was in Florida to campaign for Allen West, the Republican vying to unseat two-term Democratic Rep. Ron Klein. 

Democratic congressional candidate Timothy Bagwell is asking why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and his opponent Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) — steered millions of dollars toward a Chicago-area nonprofit that's under investigation.

Bagwell sent an 8-page letter to Health and Human Services Inspector General Daniel Levinson on Monday requesting that the office "review and determine" whether $3.3 million awarded to the Save-A-Life Foundation were "properly administered." Bagwell also sent a letter to Shimkus last month asking him to investigate the nonprofit for which he helped secure $1.5 million in 2004 and 2005.

Save-A-Life, which provides first-aid training classes to school students, is under investigation by the Illinois Attorney General's Charitable Trusts Bureau.

Bagwell also wants the inspector general to review the relationship between the nonprofit and CDC Deputy Director Douglas Browne, who served as the nonprofit's corporate treasurer from 2004 to 2009.

Michigan Democratic Rep. Gary Peters is being criticized from both the right and the left this week over his support for healthcare reform.

In a debate Sunday with his Republican, independent and Green Party challengers, the freshman Democrat was forced to defend his vote against three candidates who all want to see the law repealed, the Detroit Free Press reported.

"Peters defended his vote, saying he still feels it's critical to provide affordable, accessible health care for all Americans, noting that it does a variety of important things, like prohibit insurance companies from rescinding coverage for people who get sick and allow children to stay on their parents' insurance benefits until age 26," the Free Press wrote.

Republican Andrew "Rocky" Raczkowski disagreed. "It was a power grab by our government," he said. "I pledge to repeal it."

Meanwhile, Green Party candidate Douglas Campbell says the new law is too conservative. He wants to scrap it in favor of a universal coverage system backed by the federal government, the Free Press noted.

The latest analysis from the Cook Political Report indicates the race is tight but that the district "leans Democratic."