I realize that they’re young and I also realize that young people often times make foolish decisions. However, we’re not talking about kids here we’re talking about adults. Is there any solid evidence that this will result in fewer coeds taking birth control?
Marc
Getting pregnant in college isn’t a good idea. They would either have to leave school to return “someday” or continue the grind while carrying a baby (not good for the baby or the mother’s grades).
Considering how the people in college today are the educated workers of tomorrow and considering how taxpayers are subsidizing a large percentage of students (that’s another GD thread) I think any incentive to stay in school is a good one.
Or get an abortion.
Which, you would think, the Bush admin would be working mightily to prevent.
They’re mature enough to vote, live on their own, have an abortion, and enter into contracts, but they’re not responsible enough to take care of birth control on their own? Maybe we should raise the legal age of adulthood to 30.
Marc
Well, we subsidize plenty of things for adults. How about the home mortgage deduction?
Not “prevent”; prohibit. If they wanted to prevent abortion, they’d work to make unbiased education and a varity of means available to prevent unwanted pregnancy.
Not every co-ed, or college student for that matter, comes from Westchester County with a Visa Platinum card and $2000 per month shoe fetish. Some actually, you know, have to work, scrimp, and save to afford tuition (or at least their daddies do) and this imposes an additional burden which is quite obviously an extension of the neocon “Abstinence or bust” philosophy of birth control which has gone over so well wherever it’s been applied.
Regarding the cost, it’s one thing for pharmaceutical companies to claim that the cost is inflated by years of research and development, but all female contraceptives are essentially variations on the theme of hormone enhancement. The cost of most prescription drugs sold in the United States is vastly inflated by triple digit profit margins and everyone from the manufacturer and patent holder to the distributor to the pharmacy taking a liberal slice of the seven layer cake.
I wish I had even some modest degree of optimism for a socialized American medicine system, because it’s one of the critical services where market forces really aren’t a very good control, and consumers are neither really free nor informed enough to make credible decisions regarding cost versus benefit. However, as can been seen from Medicare/Medicaid and other semi-subsidised bureaucracies, the government is ill-prepared and capable of controlling costs and limiting fraud without severely handicapping care providers. Maybe we should just contract with Halliburton to run our medical care system… :eek:
Stranger
We’re not talking about mortgage deductions we’re talking about birth control pills. Wolfian, and others, posit that we should offer these deductions because young people are immature and are more likely to make poor decisions. So mortgage payments aren’t really germane the issue of BC pills for college students.
Marc
In my opinion, most of this thread is a rather ridiculous misunderstanding of the situation discussed in the article.
Let’s step back a few minutes. I sincerely doubt that this is a conspiracy on the part of the Bush administration, to, well fuck college kids rather than administer public healthcare plans in a fairly normal manner.
For the drug companies, the ideal world would be one in which they could have a pricing structure a bit more like airlines. What they would like to do is charge Medicare $1,000 for any given pill, even when that pill is substantially similar to available generics or any other medication on the market. But, like airlines that make all their money on the $700 fares to business travellers, they have an unlimited plane of other seats that they might as well fill. So, they would like to use price discrimination to offer that pill for $20 or some other more resonable amount to the people that have to pay for their own prescriptions or insurance companies that fight harder than Medicare to not spend dollars they absolutely don’t have to. This is quite frankly the danger of Bush’s insistence upon not negotiating drug-prices in his prescription drug benefit plan. The drug companies can simply increase their prices dramatically to whatever they like because, hey, the government will pay.
There is one saving grace in all of this: Medicare insists that it has to receive the lowest price for prescriptions that anyone receives. This discourages pharmaceutical companies from billing medicare from an unrealisticaly high “list-price” while offering insane discounts to everyone else. Now, through bending the rules or outright fraud this situation occurs somewhat anyway (witness the enormous “rebates” delivered to oncologists on EPO from Amgen which apparently led to an inappropriate overutilization of the drug to the detriment of patients health). As I understand it, this “loophole” that existed for college health centers has been closed.
I fully concede to not being an expert in the prescription of oral contraceptives, and I understand that people react diferently to different doses and combinations of preogestin and estrogen, but the fact that there are so many new patented oral contraceptive options available is in a way a bit ridiculous. They’re largely the same drugs that have existed for decades and are available in a dizzying array of relatively inexpensive generics as well. So, how does Wyeth go about making money off of Lybrel, the new “no-period” pill when generic OCP’s taken without the placebos will accomplish the exact same thing for significantly lower cost? By charging $109 at list price and offering it at significant savings to people or insurance companies that are stingier about their OCP prices.
It’s obviosuly in Wyeth’s interest to be able to sustain this type of multi-tiered pricing structure.
But is it good for our society as a whole?
Althoug the sympathy in this thread has fallen to the 8 million odd college women who’s OCP prices may increase, what about the majority of American women that do not attend college? I would guess that the number of non-college enrolled uninsured women that are candidates for oral contracpetives far exceeds the number of women that receive women’s health services from college health centers. Before we get up in arms about the added cost to oral contraceptives to college women, we should probably figure out how many women receive OCP’s via Medicaid or other public healthcare programs. Presumably this move won’t just force college women to pay prices more in line with typical OCP prices, but also force drug companies to change their marketing strategy to make the “list price” for these OCP’s more reasonable.
All in all, going to college remains correlated with a higher socioeconomic status. Granted, this move hurts them slightly, but it’s a benefit to the larger group of people that either don’t have insurance, has insurance companies that want patients put on the cheapest generics before justifying any of the new, patented, high price low-dose or other “special” OCP’s. It’s also a likely benefit to the financial health of Medicare and Medicaid.
As it stands, a low-dose generic OCP like Necon 1/35 is still a ~ $20 a month.
College kids, on the whole, ought to be smart enough to make this investment in their future. If we really feel the need to make economic incentives for college girls using OCP’s over condoms, etc., we should fund that directly rather than permit exceptions to the rules that help maintain some level of sanity in pharmaceutical pricing. Feel free to make a donation to your local Planned Parenthood who is happy to assist young women in finding economical, safe, and effective contraceptive choices.
Just wanted to resurrect this thread due to the appearance of a followup article:
Can’t see why not. People paying mortgages are, as a group, older and better off than college students. Why do they need an incentive to buy a house, if that’s the right thing for them to do? They should certainly have less of a need of a price incentive than college students do.
I’d think both liberals and conservatives could unite around the idea of spending a few tax dollars to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. But I could be wrong.
Conservatives, as a rule, are anti-woman, and regard them as breeding machines at best. They want women to get pregnant, and if that makes them suffer so much the better, and if it cut their education short, that’s better still.
Now if the evil conservatives could only find a way to ban women from wearing shoes… :rolleyes:
Uh huh. :rolleyes:
Speaking as a liberal–do you actually *know * any conservatives, Der Trihs? You’ve never said anything on this board that indicates you have even the foggiest idea what mainstream conservatives actually believe.
The number of pill packs sold is dropping because there is no longer an incentive to buy from the college pharmacy. Without the discount, the student can just go to the local pharma off campus if they like. They can also go to Planned Parenthood, who continues to sell at a discount (information in the article).
I posit also that with each additional Freshman class there is less of a stigma around being on the pill. More and more parents do not see an issue with their daughter being on the pill, so needing to go to the college clinic for a prescription that your parents will not know about is less of an issue. Again - this is a hypothesis.
It is also interesting that the clinics were NOT acting as cheap suppliers either - they were marking up the pill to be able to provide other services.
The article ALSO mentions that the co-eds can go generic for $15-20 per month. the switch in pricing simply means that you take the generic instead of the name brand if you are poor.
Finally, to see the effect we would need to know if there is a measurable increase in drop-out rates due to pregnancy.
or an increase in college area abortions.
I left that part out on purpose, since other posters were using the unplanned pregnancy arguement - not the increase in cost due to an abortion arguement.
If my tax dollars are going to subsidize birth control for college students, then by rights I should be getting some of that hot co-ed sex.
It is a reverse ponzi - you were supposed to get the hot-coed sex when young, then pay for it for the rest of your life.
Hmm - sounds like my marriage…
[ow!] - just kidding honey!
Not to speak for him, but I suspect he doesn’t really care what a given conservative actually thinks or believes, that it doesn’t really matter, if the practical effect of the policies is to oppress women and prevent them from pursuing their education, entering the workplace, etc., as equals. Which, of course, it is. Now, whether Trihs is committing some analytical error by (apparently) conflating this practical result with whatever the beliefs and intentions might have been, and making no distinction between them (or making an unwarranted assumption about the latter based on the former), well, that’s a different question.
I agree that this is the effect of many conservative policies, but Der Trihs was actually making a statement about conservatives’ intentions (e.g., to increase the amount of pain experienced by women).