By Jeanine Budd
One year ago, Alison Owens went into a CVS pharmacy, like she did every month, to buy birth control pills. But this time, instead of paying the usual $15, Owens was charged nearly triple that – the price of her contraception had jumped to $40. She reluctantly paid, she said, but later switched to a cheaper, more generic brand.
The junior political science major is one of many college students nationwide who have been forced to reconsider their finances in order to stay on the pill following a sudden spike in prices.
“I don’t plan on taking [birth control] after I graduate college, because I’m mainly using it for health reasons and to regulate my period,” Owens said. “If I was having financial difficulties, I would stop taking it and just use condoms as a method of birth control.”
The wholesale price of birth control jumped from $3.20 last year to $33.31 this year, according to recent newspaper reports. And the price of birth control offered through college health care centers has also increased, according to a report published in The News last Spring. The spike in prices – on and off campuses – follows the 2005 passage of the Federal Deficit Reduction Act (DRA).
The act went into effect January 2006 and required pharmaceutical companies to extend the same price breaks they historically offered to college health care centers to other providers nationwide. To comply, pharmaceutical companies deregulated the price of birth control on campus instead. Though students at some schools, like Princeton, saw prices triple, Northeastern students were not directly impacted by this jump in prices, according to the report. Northeastern’s University Health and Counseling Services (UHCS) offers prescriptions, but it does not fill them. Women who don’t get their prescriptions through UHCS have needed to adjust.
“Looking at it from a women’s perspective, it’s her responsibility to take care of sexual protection,” said Rebecca Dufendach, a senior history major and president of Northeastern’s Feminist Student Organization (FSO). “Making protection an economic burden on young women, who don’t have that money to spare anyway, is targeting a population who is marginalized, in my opinion, which is unfair.”
FSO members have signed an online petition that urges US representatives to overturn the decision that made birth control prices skyrocket, Dufendach said. The petition can be found on the Planned Parenthood website, plannedparenthood.org.
For more than 90 years, Planned Parenthood has provided affordable health care to men, women and teens, and reproductive health care to women. Twenty-five percent of women in the United States have visited Planned Parenthood for health care at least once in their lives, according to the website.
“We’re certainly working to get the problem fixed in Congress and to restore access for college students,” said Lisa Dacey, the media relations coordinator at Planned Parenthood in Boston. “Making birth control less affordable for college students and young women is simply bad public policy. It’s basic healthcare that we’re dealing with here.”
Dacey said each states’ local Planned Parenthood office has been working with its congressional representatives to push for legislation that would reverse damages done by the DRA.
About 3 million undergraduate women are either taking or have been prescribed birth control at some point, according to a survey by the American College Health Association in Spring 2006, The News reported last year.
“While there have certainly been opponents to this cause, we’re fortunate enough that representatives in Massachusetts understand the situation,” Dacey said. “They’ve all signed legislation to restore access. So, we are definitely making progress.”
US Senators Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mont.) have introduced the Prevention Through Affordable Access Act, which aims to bring birth control prices down to previous levels on campuses, according to a Planned Parenthood press release. Massachusetts’ senior Senator Edward Kennedy also supports the bill.
“This bill is win-win,” said Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “Access to affordable birth control is something Democrats and Republicans agree on. It is mainstream, pro-prevention, pro-women’s health legislation. And it won’t cost the taxpayers a dime.”
Because of the sudden spike in prices, Owens said she was forced to switch from Ortho Tri-Cyclen, the pill she had been taking since she started college, to a more generic brand called Micro Gestin.
But Tabitha Smith-Sprague, a junior history major in the School of Professional and Continuing Studies program, said for her, birth control has always cost between $20 to $25. While some students have felt the price jump, her insurance with Blue Cross/Blue Shield covers the cost.
The same can be said for Suzanne Igarteburu, a junior English major, who is covered by Blue Cross/Blue Shield through her mother.
Through Northeastern’s health insurance, the price for a 30-day prescription for any prescription drug ranges from $5 to $15, according to a pamphlet offered at UHCS.
“I think a lot of people are going to have to reconsider their coverage plans,” Dufendach said. “Because, if you were on NU’s coverage plan, you’d be paying the same price. But if you’re not, it’s not subsidized. I think there could be a lot of people shifting to that plan, because this is a huge increase in money.”
While the new law does not affect Smith-Sprague, she said she understands why the issue is important.
“The reality is that people have sex,” she said. “If you don’t protect yourself, you either have to raise a child or shell out money for an abortion. Either way, you’re going to suffer consequences. When you raise the prices of this kind of thing, you put people in a tough situation.”
