Not sure if this should go here or the Pit…
Story here.
I wasn’t aware that college nurses did anything but hand out cheap(er) birth control. What a fucking crock. Maybe someone was unhappy with the decline in teenage pregnancies?
Based on the thread title I going to suggest a porn review belongs in CS, but . . . never mind.
Maybe they should spend more time studying! Why when I was in college… um, oh… never mind.
The thread title reminds me of a story I heard about “Dobie Gillis” creator Max Schulman and why he was thrown off the staff of his college paper. During WWII there was a drive by sororities collecting candles for recycling into whatever war matériel you can recycle paraffin into. Shulman’s headline was, “Co-eds Prepare Boxes for Candle Stuffing.”
Slogan popular during the same era;
“Lights out at 9. Candles out at 10.”
So women will have to pay full price for their BC pills. What’s the big deal?
Marc
That article is a bit less than tear inducing. It merely says that some schools now have increased prices for some brands of birth control pills. It is the result of a complex bill and the example is a model of the law of unintended consequences. Still, it never says that there aren’t cheaper options still readily available.
[sexist joke]
Dude, who do you think is going to have to pay for the increase in price?
[/sexist joke]
No, American college students will have to pay outrageously over-inflated, obscene prices for birth control pills because the drug companies can get away with it here. The same birth control pills that any woman can buy over-the-counter in Mexico (where I used to live and buy them) for what’s now probably a couple of bucks a month (a little over 10 years ago I could buy a box with a 3-month supply for $3.00).
Yeah, yeah, foreign drugs bad and scary, can’t trust they’re the real thing, yadda, yadda. Nonsense. [
](BBC ON THIS DAY | 4 | 1961: Birth control pill 'available to all') Same damn pills. Then; $33/month in the U.S., $1/month just over the border. It’s a government-sanctioned, masterful con game.
What makes college age women so special that they should get these pills at a discount?
I don’t know about. Haven’t we been having problems with food from China lately? Anyway, I think the price of drugs in the United States and the lack of a discount for college students are seperate issues altogether.
Marc
They like to screw, they’re in the middle of getting an education, and I’d prefer they finish. IMHO anyone under 22 should get the discount.
Sounds like a difference of the stupid regulations we put on drugs here in the US. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that all the red tape we put on developing and approving drugs in the U.S. didn’t raise the cost of your birth control as much as it did.
This isn’t a con run by the drug companies, but your own government. I haven’t seen any evidence that birth control isn’t subject to the same economic pressures as, say, a loaf of bread. Want lower cost of drugs? Fight the FDA, fight the patent system, not the drug companies.
Serious mark-up. I mean SERIOUS.
In the UK, BTW all women are entitled to free hormonal birth control. I didn’t pay a penny for my pills, or my Mirena.
I can, however, look up in my BNF and find out what my government pays for a three month supply of them (or at least paid for them in 2005, my newest copy is at work).
These are all proper pills, not knock-offs, the cheaper ones are older, with more side effects. The brand names may be different to the ones in the USA, but chances are, your pill is on this list.
Combined pills:
Loestrin 20: £2.70
Mercilon: £7.97
Femodette: £9.00
Evra patches: £16.26
Logynon: £3.92
Logynon ED (as Logynon, plus 7 sugar pills): £3.92
Microgynon 30: £2.82
Microgynon 30 ED: £2.56
Ovranette: £2.29
Trinordial: £4.04
BiNovum: £2.13
Brevinor: £1.99
Loestrin 30: £3.90
Norimin: £2.28
Ovysmen: £1.62
Synphase: £3.60
TriNovum: £2.95
Cilest: £6.10
Marvelon: £6.70
Yasmin: £14.70
Femodene: £6.84
Femodene ED: £6.84
Minulet: £6.36
Triadene: £9.54
Tri-Minulet: £8.87
Norinyl-I: £2.19
Emergency contraception:
Levonelle (Plan B) cost £13.83 if you want the convenience of one tablet, £5.11 if you didn’t mind taking two. Most pharmacies charge between £8.00 and £15.00.
Progesterone only pills:
Cerazette: £8.85
Femulen: £3.31
Micronor: £1.80
Microval: 84p for 35 days
Norgeston: 98p for 35 days
Noriday: £2.10
Depo-Provera: £5.01 per injection
Implanon: £90.00 per implant
Mirena: £83.16 per 5 year IUD
If you want to find your pill, post the ingredients and I’ll find a match. £1= $2.02 at the current exchange rate, so double all the numbers to get an idea of the price in dollars.
Sorry pharmacies charge between £8.00-£16.00 for 2 pills and about £24 for one pill of emergency contraception.
It’s really a perfect combination of Republican goals. The pharma folks are heavy contributors, so you throw them a little more profit. The pro-life/Catholic folks want to be reassured that they still have clout, so you make contraception less accessable. Now, here’s the beauty part; you can claim it saves money (even though it doesn’t,) so the president gets to look fiscally responsible!
This saddens me. Coeds should be given all incentives to fuck as much as possible. It will make the world a better place. I think the Gates Foundation should step in and subsidize this most important program.
If you paid taxes you did.
I just can’t get upset over something like this. I mean college students (or their parents) are paying somewhere between $500 and $2500 a month for school tuition alone and an extra $35 is gonna break them? The spending habits of college co-eds are ridiculous. OK, so its one less moose embroidered Abercrombie sweater a month, or 5 fewer half-calf double devon cream mocha caps a month for the privilege of not getting pregnant. Cry me a river.
The problem is this: The price burden is not REALLY an issue (i.e., few college students are likely to wind up going without meals or books because of this). What IS an issue is that birth control, at least in my college experience (1990s), was one of the things that students absolutely, positively paid for themselves, no parental intervention. And college students are notoriously bad financial planners. “Hmm… I have $50 in my checking account … do I spend it on beer, or on those birth control pills? I’ll spend it on beer, and hope I remember to have a cheap condom on me at the time that I need it…”
The upshot is, if birth control is dirt cheap, kids are more likely to buy and use it, and we’re all more likely to wind up with fewer unplanned pregnancies and single moms, which most people are for. Anything that makes birth control slightly less accessible makes it more likely that kids will just shrug their shoulders and skip it. Why do you think so many groups hand out free condoms by the bucketload? It’s because they’re praying that, maybe, just maybe, if the dorm rooms have condoms covering almost every surface, kids might find them convenient enough to use.
Whatever. More babies means more poverty, more lives ruined, more single mothers and more screaming infants at the grocery store. You can cut all the free sex ed and free condoms and cheap pills and people under 20 are going to fuck anyway. This isn’t an incentive for them to do it, this is an incentive for them to get away with it.
600 billion dollars a year to ship men off to die somewhere and pay billionaires to pay scientists to research better ways to blow shit up and we can’t spare a few mil other than to say “keep it in your pants?” Fuck that, I HATE babies.
Excuse me if, after six years, I don’t accept that a Bush administration action that will result in decreased access to birth control was necessarily “unintended.”