Google “health insurance viagra” and you’ll find many hits, including these:
http://info.insure.com/health/faq/pillbills.htm
Many of them appear to have the same “bent” as I did above (why Viagra but not The Pill), also many appear to be links to dodgy websites judging by the snippets shown in google’s results listing, so click at your own risk.
A.R. Cane: Doggonit, you’re making sense!! I don’t agree with the results, but I can understand your reasoning 
This is a drug formulary database of HMO health plans in California. The above link is to their page that lists the status of Viagra on various formularies.
Also, I can’t give a cite for this, because it’s on my employer’s intranet, but I just looked it up, and Viagra prescribed for erectile dysfunction is covered by my insurance as a tier 3 nonpreferred drug, which means it has a 40% copay, and it has a limitation of 18 pills per 100 days.
If it’s being prescribed for pulmonary arterial hypertension, however, it’s a tier 2 with a 20% copay.
Not my health insurance. I couldn’t get Viagra covered under insurance, even though I have ED-related problems. Damn things were $12 a pill :mad:
Well, those cites don’t convince me of anything. Mama Zappa’s are both editorial, and the HMO list doesn’t compare their coverage of birth control. If there’s a substantive difference between coverage of ED and BC I’d like to see it. I’ve had 3 insurance carriers that didn’t.
For the record, I think such a disparity would be flat immoral, the same as pharmacies that won’t fill plan B. I just wonder about “everybody knows that yadda yadda yadda.”
The number of women who will become pregnant as a DIRECT RESULT of the insurance company’s refusal to cover birth control pills is probably ridiculously small. The vast majority of women will choose to pay out of pocket or use another form of birth control.
I mean really…do you actually think that their are women out there with lives together enough to include insurance who would seriously think " There’s no way I can afford $35.00 a month for pills, so I guess I’ll just get pregnant?" That’s the only way the comparison between the cost of pregnancy and pill holds water.
Although I vastly respect QtM, I also know very, very few of his patients have need of insurance or birth control pills. So I’m guessing this doesn’t come up much in his practice. Even in a relatively long definition of the short run, it seems it would still be cheaper to cover the pills. If the insurance covers $25/mo, that’s $300 a year and $900 every 3 years. I doubt you can have a baby for that.
I once worked taking benefits questions about a large number of insurance plans. Most of the HMOs covered insurance, but the fee-for-service plan did not. That’s because their plan was based around the idea of being a tool for managing financial risk. The vast majority of women should expect to need to manage their fertility for around 40 years. Therefore birth control is not an issue of uncertainty, or financial risk.
At the time I was farirly incensed, but increasingly I see insurance in just that way–as a tool to keep folks from going broke from unexpected health risks. More like auto insurance than an HMO. Does it really make sense to process a monthly claim for most women for about 20-30 years? Even normal delivery of a baby is not an unexpected financial risk. Perhaps it should be financed more like buying a car–either save up first or make payments.
Am I talking crazy? This perspective only makes sense if you consider the insurance as needing to be broadly affordable and needing it to cover you in worst-case scenarios (cancer, brain surgery, gunshot…), while you take care of the maintenance, again like you do with a car.
My theory is that insurance companies often refuse to cover the cost of oral contraceptives because they can. It’s not a question of having to shell out for a baby because the woman couldn’t get her birth control pills. Women who take their birth control seriously will either shell out their own money, or they will switch to another form of birth control. Hence, no baby, and the insurance company gets off cheap.
My health insurance company is based around a St Somebody health system and thus, refuses to cover BC. It’s even in the literature as the reason, plain and simple.
However, my employer offers a supplementary free co-insurance to go with that plan that does nothing but cover BC, termination and some fertility treatments. I didn’t know that for years until a nurse processing my payment happened to mention it. A few phone calls later, I was covered. Perhaps there’s something similar available that you need to do a little digging to find?
When I was in grad school in the US, we had to take the insurance chosen by the school. This insurance changed every year, leading to a lot of problems with “pre-existing conditions”.
On the summer I graduated, I received the policy for what would be the next year’s policy. The only ObGyn procedure it covered was abortions. Why? Because they have to cover abortions, of course; if they could have skipped on covering abortions, they would skip!
I make a point of reading every policy very carefully; several times I’ve found out that HR had not…
I don’t have an answer to your insurance question, but I may have a suggestion for you. It sounds like you are enrolled at a college or university. Does your school have a medical center and pharmacy on campus? If so, look into getting the prescription filled there. It’s sometimes very inexpensive on campus. When I was in school, it was about $7 compared to about $35 at a retail pharmacy.
Where I live, the Health Department will give you free birth control if you qualify. check into it.
I wonder if it’s possible that those insurance companies that don’t cover birth control have calculated the possibility that more babies = more people = more insurance premium $$.
Given today’s arcane and exhaustive actuarial processes, it wouldn’t surprise me.