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Ten Must-Read Stories From This Week

Spend some of your weekend reading these important stories from the week that you might have missed.

• Terrible news for Obamacare haters: The law is not going to collapse: New data from the Department of Health and Human Services, industry testimonials, and other recent developments suggest that Republican wishes that the ACA would not be able to recover from the botched rollout are dead.
• Senator Wants To Force Low-Income Americans To Show ID For Their Food: Food stamp recipients will have their grocery store humiliation compounded by having to show a photo ID in order to buy food if Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) gets his way.
• Here’s Walmart’s Internal Guide To Fighting Unions And Monitoring Workers: Leaked internal documents show that Walmart’s strategy for fighting to keep its workers from forming unions includes instructing managers to report suspicious activity and warning workers that joining OUR Walmart could hurt them.
• House Republicans Are Pushing A Bill That Would Force The IRS To Audit Rape Victims: House Republicans are currently advancing the “No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act,” or HR 7, a measure that would impose sweeping restrictions on abortion coverage that could make the procedure less affordable for Americans across the country. In addition to preventing low-income women from using their Medicaid coverage to access abortion, HR 7 could also have dramatic implications for the tax code and the private insurance market. One of its most controversial provisions could actually require the Internal Revenue Service to conduct audits of rape victims.
• The Myth Of The Absent Black Father: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently published new data on the role that American fathers play in parenting their children. The findings, some of which are in the graphic below, dispel a frequently held stereotype.


CREDIT: Centers for Disease Control

• People will die preventable deaths because Alaska’s GOP governor refused to expand Medicaid: Nonpartisan legislative researches in the states have concluded that Gov. Sean Parnell’s decision not to expand the subsidy in Alaska will have a variety of detrimental effects, including an increased chance that “more Alaskans will suffer from serious illness and disease” and that “scores of deaths” that could have been prevented may occur.
• The Water Ban In West Virginia Is Over, But The Health Impacts For Thousands Remain A Mystery: Even though the water bans have been lifted in many of the affected parts of West Virginia, people complaining of symptoms from the spill continue to pour into emergency rooms.
• It Is Expensive to Be Poor: Minimum-wage jobs are physically demanding, have unpredictable schedules, and pay so meagerly that workers can’t save up enough to move on, writes noted author Barbara Ehrenreich.
• Pennsylvania Judge Strikes Down New Voter ID Law: In a major victory for proponents of voting rights, a Pennsylvania judge overturned the state’s new voter identification law on Friday. Officials estimated that as many as 750,000 Pennsylvanians lacked an acceptable identification, leaving nearly 1 in 10 voters at risk of being disenfranchised.
• Not A Single Female Student Took The AP Computer Science Test In Two States: In Mississippi and Montana, no female students took the Advanced Placement (AP) test in computer science last year. In the states where girls did take the test, they made up less than a third of the test takers.