Planned Parenthood | Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota Action Fund

October 17, 2007 1:31:01

by Anna
Web Correspondent
Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota Action Fund

 Most women know that oral contraceptives are the way to go if they want trustworthy birth control, and up until recently birth control was generally inexpensive. For groups like low-income women and college students who are short on cash but need reliable protection, money makes all the difference, so now that prices have skyrocketed at college health centers and clinics, these groups have been hit hard.

The difference is striking; in some cases a woman must now pay two or three times as much as she was paying just a few months ago. At Kansas State University, for example, prices went from $10 a pack to $30.

Any price increase is a stretch when you don't have a lot of money lying around-I can state from firsthand experience as a college student that finding so much as 75 cents in your pocket can be thrilling because it means you can do one more load of laundry. Therefore, it wouldn't be shocking if some of the 39 percent of undergraduate women and the many low-income women who currently use oral contraceptives decided to switch to other forms of birth control. This is especially concerning because other methods like condoms are less reliable than birth control pills, which are 99.7 percent effective.

Health experts claim that the increasing prices were an unintended result of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, a complex piece of legislation that went into effect in January. The law was meant to alter policies behind Medicaid rebates paid to states, but something in the fine print made it illegal for drug companies to sell birth control pills at discount to institutions like college health services and other safety net providers. Although this was an error in the legislation, nothing has been done to remedy the situation.

Furthermore, since the government itself didn't fully realize what the bill's repercussions would be, health workers at the organizations that were affected didn't know the change had taken place until they received their next shipments of birth control pills and noticed the substantial price increase.

"It's just unnerving to think they can do these things without anybody knowing," Kathy McNaul, the nurse practitioner at Macalester College's Winton Health Services, said.

McNaul explained that Macalester only writes prescriptions for birth control pills but does not provide them, so students at Mac are paying the same price as before if they take their prescription to a pharmacy. Many Macalester students don't go through Winton at all, recognizing that in the past it has been cheaper to go to places like Family Tree rather than a pharmacy, but that might change now that pills are pricier at those clinics.

The same goes for area schools like Hamline, which has no nurse practitioner, and Catholic colleges like St. Thomas (Catholic schools, as a rule, do not give out birth control pills). But at the University of Minnesota, where students are able to pick up their pills directly through the U's Boynton Health Services, pills bought through student insurance now cost around $12 a pack where they used to cost the same amount for three packs.

McNaul said that representatives from college health services have been pushing the Food and Drug Administration to take action on the unintended consequences of the Deficit Reduction Act, but it might be a long and difficult process to get prices back to where they were. All because, as McNaul puts it, "nobody really reads these bills anymore."