Saturday, March 24, 2007

Can You Afford to Spend $50 a Month on Birth Control? | Slog | The Stranger's Blog | The Stranger | Seattle's Only Newspaper:

Neither can I. And I sure as hell couldn’t when I was in college, where I relied on the student health center to provide cheap, effective birth control pills for between $10 and $15 a month. I can only assume that these days, when tuition and book costs are higher than ever before and rising, a $500-or-more annual hike in birth control expenses is a bigger burden than ever before. Which is why it’s such terrible news that Congress is eliminating an incentive in the Medicaid rebate law that encouraged companies to provide low-cost contraceptives to college campuses. The change will boost the price of birth control as much as 300 percent.