The Dallas Morning News Editorial Board recently published a great opinion editorial to highlight the ongoing problem of rising birth control costs at university health centers and non-profit health clinics due to an inadvertant change made in the federal Deficit Reduction Act (DRA) of 2006.
The quoted editorial is below.
"Sometimes, a minor change in legislation aimed at addressing one problem leads to a bigger, unintended problem elsewhere. That's what happened with the Deficit Reduction Act that became law in 2006.
Congress wanted to prevent pharmaceutical companies from discounting medicines to the point that they undercut the government's guaranteed lowest prices offered under Medicaid. So the Deficit Reduction Act placed strict limits on how companies could sell discounted pharmaceuticals.
The unexpected consequence is that the act also blocked 203 family-planning clinics nationwide from providing discounted birth-control pills, severely curtailing the availability of affordable oral contraception to low-income women and college students.
For the last year, clinics have drawn from stockpiles of pills purchased before 2006. But those stockpiles are dwindling, and already, women are seeing their monthly prescription prices jump 400 percent to 500 percent.
Family-planning activists warn that low-income women might opt for no contraception, rather than pay $40 or $50 a month for the pill; that could lead to a jump in unwanted pregnancies. In light of Texas' high rates of pregnancy among teens and single, low-income women, this issue deserves our lawmakers' urgent attention.
Blocking low-cost contraception was never the intention of the Deficit Reduction Act. But getting the provision restored has been nearly impossible.
Successive attempts by Planned Parenthood and other advocacy groups to change the law have failed, mainly because supporters in Congress don't want to tangle with the religious right. Words such as "reproductive health" or "contraception" risk provoking a presidential veto.
The irony is, if Congress fails to act quickly, the nation could soon see a sudden jump in unwanted pregnancies. A study in the Oct. 13 issue of the British medical journal Lancet drew a direct link between a rise in abortion rates and a decline in contraceptive use.
We think it's time for Congress to overcome its veto fear and restore the availability of affordable oral contraceptives. President Bush maintains an interest in fighting unwanted pregnancies and abortions; this is the most common-sense way to do it."
