This is a lovely issue 1 ad
Not sure i have seen it shared on here
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Not really, but I just ignore them. When they start asking, I just reply “No, thank you.” Most of the askers don’t even care about the initiative. They get paid, I assume, by the number of signatures. That makes for an incentive to distort the initiative’s true aims to get more signatures, which provides me a greater incentive not to sign.
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Was interested to see that the FDA has approved an over the counter birth control pill. Presumably it will not be covered by US medical insurance plans since it is non-prescription? Will be interesting to see what obstacles will be thrown up in some states to its sale.
Non-prescription birth control pills not approved yet in Canada except for morning after pills but birth control pills are free here in BC as they are covered by medicare.
I wonder how this will shake out. One effect of making something OTC is that it is no longer covered by health insurance.
An example is allergy medication. You used to have to get an Rx and it was covered by your prescription plan. Now you have to pay out of pocket, more than had it been covered.
So while it makes the medication cheaper for people without insurance, it makes it more for people with.
To the extent that insurers drop the premiums accordingly then in aggregate it shakes out. But the people who don’t need the medication (in the case of BC pills: men and old people) are subsidizing the ones who do, and that subsidy effect goes away when the medication becomes OTC.
Will younger women be more likely to drop insurance if it’s no longer paying for BC pills? It certainly changes the math on whether it’s worthwhile for them to have coverage or not.
Also, one type of BC is going OTC. Are women now going to be pushed to take the OTC version instead of the Rx they’ve been taking for years?
Seems like there could be a lot of different impacts here.
Kind of, I don’t know what those cost when they were prescription drugs. But some/most of the cost back then was baked into the premium and spread out over the pool. For the individual buying them it was cheaper when they just paid the copay, and that’s annoying, but the overall cost might have come down when they went OTC.
Kinda like how I really hate the ‘ask your doctor how you can get with no out of pocket cost’ rebate scheme. I don’t hate that some people who need assistance get it, but overall it’s a distortion that tends to drive costs higher.
/soap box
I assume that “morning after” pills are non-prescription in the US. Presumably they have had some effect on drug plans for prescription contraceptives? Have any states tried to block their sale?
Yes I mentioned that in the part that you didn’t quote.
Right now men are subsidizing the cost of birth control pills for women and that will no longer happen if it’s OTC.
It’s just a reality and perhaps an unintended consequence of making BC pills available OTC.
I wonder if it drives more women to methods that are covered, such as IUDs or implants or injections and how the cost and effectiveness compares. (I think covered methods are universally more effective than the pills as it’s harder to screw them up, so more the cost… and I suppose it’s fair to include the cost of an unintended pregnancy in the cost calculation.)
Correct
Perhaps but that would be unfortunate. I have no personal experience with the morning after pill, but my understanding is that it’s a pretty unpleasant experience and not something you’d want to do every time you had sex. It really is meant to just be for emergencies. A woman was raped while not on any sort of birth control, the condom broke, that sort of thing.
I believe that it is legal everywhere, but I’d be shocked if some state legislators have not tried to block it.
We agree on that.
Reading comprehension fail, my bad.
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I walk past them most of the time. I guess it depends where you are. They congregate at the BART stations where my wife gets off and often out in front of the Target or other shopping centers but I don’t find them difficult to avoid and they are only out at certain times of the election cycles.
Atlanta makes it extremely difficult to petition to get a referendum on the ballot. You may have read about the big ongoing fight here over “Cop City”, a police training center that was authorized under some shady circumstances that many residents don’t want. It took some legal wrangling to force the city clerk to even allow a petition. It was approved June 22, and to get the referendum on the ballot organizers have to collect 70,000 signatures of registered voters in the city in only 58 days. In the last mayoral runoff election, 80k people voted. If they pull off this near impossible task, I think it will be the first referendum added by petition in the city’s 186 year history.
For morning after pills some have tried, have not been successful. However, some have been successful in allowing businesses to refuse to sell it to whoever they decide shouldn’t get it. Also, true abortifacients (e.g. mifepristone and misoprostol) are banned in some states (whereas the “morning-after pill” does not cause an abortion of an implanted zygote.)
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The most common form of oral birth control (the mostly-estrogen pill) is still prescription only. What i wonder is not about the tiny impact on premiums of a less-common oral contraceptive becoming OTC, but whether a lot of women will switch from “the pill” which requires you to see a doctor every year, to the progesterone-only pill, which was just approved for OTC use.
Also, there are some drugs that can be bought with or without a prescription. I take a proton-pump inhibitor for acid reflux. You can go to a drugstore and buy a 10 or 20 day supply OTC, or you can get a 3 month supply with a prescription, and have it covered by health insurance. So I’m not even certain this change affects health insurance coverage.
But it does make the progesterone birth control pill a hell of a lot more accessible than it used to be.
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Gilead comes to Nebraska.
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In fairness…it was an abortion at 23-29 weeks (I’ve seen conflicting details), at a time when abortion was legal to 20 weeks in that state (although I’d guess there wasn’t a provider within a couple of hours…) I wouldn’t want to condemn someone for doing what they had to to protect their health…but I have to admit to being curious why she sought to terminate the pregnancy so late (although it’s clearly none of my business).
The online coverage I skimmed doesn’t seem to provide the teen’s and mother’s side of their story. The coverage I did skim did provide a…disturbing illustration of how headlines can be used to bias the tone of the story.
Also, she wasn’t arrested specifically for terminating the pregnancy. She was arrested for hiding the body.
Which… if she was really 23/24 weeks pregnant then I guess it’s not clear what else she could have done once she took the medication.
If she’d showed up at the hospital with the dead fetus, or after she’d taken the pill to expel the fetus… what would they have done.
Heck, I guess she could have not taken the second pill and showed up like “I don’t know what’s going on, but I haven’t felt the baby kicking in a while” … I don’t know how long the first pill is detectable in her or the baby’s system. Or what they would have done if they figured out that she took an abortion pill past the 20 week cutoff.
Regardless of all of that, they were dumb to talk about it on Facebook Messenger.
There were a couple of other charges (but none of them “getting an abortion”) that were dropped in a plea deal.
Her mom is still facing felony charges for performing an illegal abortion (i.e. after 20 weeks), and for performing an abortion without a medical license.
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Thanks… hadn’t realized that about the mom.
I was wondering if the sentence was because people think the fetus could have been resuscitated when it was expelled.
Anyway, I had a miscarriage once (not pill induced) (like I hear 1/3 of all pregnancies end) and I have very little sympathy with people who think they can legislate what you do while you have one (assuming a live child is not in the picture). Anyone who legislates that stuff should first have that experience of being in pain for hours alone and bleeding out all the while. Then they can talk.
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