Barack Obama

Students Challenge Rising Cost of "The Pill"

Monday, November 5, 2007

Birth control at Iowa colleges jumped from $15 to $53, leading to the effort.

Des Moines Register By LISA ROSSI

Ames, IA - A petition to Congress from more than 400 Iowa college students is part of an intensifying lobbying effort among college students and school employees to counter the effects of federal legislation that in January made it more difficult for contraceptive manufacturers to offer discounts to college health centers.

Prices for popular name brand birth control products such as Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo have already increased from about $15 a pack to $53 a pack at campus health care centers at Iowa's public universities.

The 2005 Deficit Reduction Act passed by Congress changed the way manufacturers calculate Medicaid-related rebates to states, making it more expensive for the companies to offer discounts to colleges.

The higher prices are for college women who do not have insurance or do not want to use their parents' insurance for fear the purchase would show up on their parents' insurance records, Iowa campus pharmacists said.

"We think affordable birth control is something we can all agree on," said Dana Gustafson, 20, of Rockford, Ill. She is a junior at Drake University and a member of a pro-choice organization at Drake that has helped mobilize lobbying efforts on the birth control issue.

Students who consider themselves to be anti-abortion are less concerned about the birth control price increases.

Rachel Downey, 21, an Iowa State University senior from Clive, said members of the ISU Students for Life organization are split on the contraceptive issue, but she said many do not think it is the best option.

Downey, president of the group, which has 240 people on its e-mail list, said she supports natural family planning, a method where partners are abstinent during the fertile part of a woman's menstrual cycle.

"It's a week or 10 days when you don't have sex. Then it's a honeymoon ... after that," Downey said. "It just seems to really be the natural way that's not going to mess up your body."

Planned Parenthood officials in Iowa recommend couples use one form of birth control and a backup to prevent unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. They also said that natural family planning is not as reliable as other methods intended to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

The petition on birth control prices will be delivered to U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Ia., and U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Ia., in December, said Julie Stauch, vice president of governmental affairs at Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa.

This is part of a greater nationwide effort coordinated by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America where petitions on the birth control expense are being drafted and signed at campuses nationwide.

The U.S. House of Representatives addressed the issue last week, when Rep. Joseph Crowley, D-N.Y., introduced legislation that would allow pharmaceutical companies to sell birth control at discounted rates to college clinics and low-income health care providers.

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is expected to introduce that same bill in the U.S. Senate sometime this week, which Harkin plans to co-sponsor, aides in both offices said Friday.

Thirty-eight percent of college students reported in data released in spring of 2006 that they or a partner used oral contraceptives to prevent pregnancy the last time they had sex, according to the American College Health Association.

Approximately six university health centers nationwide have discontinued selling contraceptives as a result of the legislation that has made it difficult for manufacturers to offer discounts to campuses, said Mary Hoban of the college health association.

Many campus health centers purchased discounted birth control in bulk before the legislation went into effect, but three-quarters of the association's 141 members have run out of the bulk supplies, she said.

The University of Iowa is the only public university that so far has run out of supplies of Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo, the oral contraceptive popular among college women. The price at the U of I increased in the spring of 2007 from $15 per month to $53 per month, pharmacists said.

That brand is expected to last at its $15-per-month rate until next semester at the University of Northern Iowa, when its costs could increase to between the high $40s to low $50s per pack, pharmacists said. ISU pharmacists expect their $12- to $15-per-pack discounted supply of that brand to run out in August.

Kim Spading, a pharmacist at the U of I's student health service, said health care providers have worked to help students who don't have insurance or who don't want to use their parents' insurance to switch to generic brands of birth control. "To be honest, a lot of the birth control pills are so similar there is not any reason one is better than another," she said.

But opponents of the price increase point to possible side effects of generic brands.

"I'm hearing providers frustrated by that: They can't prescribe the best medication. They have to go by what the student can afford the pay," Hoban said.

Generic brands of birth control cost between $16 and $25 per month at Iowa's public university health centers.