“The law is doing exactly what the law says should be done”, researchers conclude.
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Despite these positive findings, many women still do not have access to affordable birth control under the ACA.
Under the Affordable Care Act, women are entitled to “preventive care and screenings provided… including all Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved contraceptives, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for women with reproductive capacity, as prescribed by a health care provider”. The savings is estimated at $1.4 billion, according to Washington Post.
Despite the fact that small businesses with fewer than 50 full-time employees are not subject to the ACA’s “employer mandate” (a penalty tax on larger companies that do not provide sufficient group health insurance coverage for their employees), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that small businesses continuing with HRAs would suffer an excise tax of USD100 per day for each employee not covered.
“We found that mean and median per prescription out-of-pocket expenses have decreased for nearly all reversible contraceptive methods on the market”.
Researchers took a random sampling of 790,000 women between the ages of 13 to 45 and studied their use of contraceptives from 2008 to 2013. “The average percentages of out-of-pocket spending for oral contraceptive pill prescriptions and intrauterine device insertions by women using those methods both dropped by 20 percentage points after implementation of the ACA mandate”, Becker wrote. The individual savings have been an average of $255 per woman for the birth control pill and $248 for IUDs (on which women saved as much as 68%).
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The country’s current rate of unplanned pregnancy is about 51 percent. “I find this study persuasive and consistent with what other studies are finding”, said Alina Salganicoff, the director of women’s health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
