Bush Program Unintentionally Ends Subsidy on College Birth Control

JunkYardBlog ^ | 7/26/2007 | SeeDubya

[Pyro7480]

Dawn Eden, call your office:

For years, drug companies sold birth-control pills and other contraceptives to university health services at a big discount. This has served as an entree to young consumers for the drug companies, and a profit center for the schools, which sell them to students at a moderate markup. Students pay perhaps $15 a month for contraceptives that otherwise can retail for $50 or more.

But colleges and universities say the drug companies have stopped offering the discounts, and are now charging the schools much more. The change has an unlikely origin: the Deficit Reduction Act signed by President Bush last year. The legislation aimed to pare $39 billion in spending on federal programs, from subsidized student loans to Medicaid. And among the changes was one that, through an arcane set of circumstances, created a disincentive for drug makers to offer school discounts.

Not only hadn't I realized that there was effectively a federal subsidy for drug companies to sell birth control to colleges, I hadn't even realized that colleges actually had found a way to profit from student fornication. Nice work if you can get it.

My own college, the Academy for Fancy Lads, didn't seem to follow this pattern and instead tried to give us as much free birth control as we could carry. I suspect their financial plan was that more childless alumni would be inclined to leave their vast fortunes to their alma mater, rather than demanding the university accept their moronic progeny before they forked over any of the long green.

I think they pretty much gave the girls free IED's or pills or whatever they wanted through the student health plan. As for the gentlemen, I went back from Freshman orientation armed with enough condoms for a week's shore leave in Tijuana, which I promptly filled with water and threw out the window at passing feminists. There were always more Trojans in an envelope on the college dean's door, which sort of diminished the seriousness of a visit to him. Son, you need to work much harder, and don't forget to grab a fistful of jimmy-hats on your way back to study hall.

Anyway, this is a good deal even though it will affect college norms not a whit. That's not what I care about so much as that I feel zero obligation to have my tax dollars subsidize some DKE's consequence-free Natty-light-fueled post-toga contemplation of the sweet mysteries of life, when they could be applied instead toward introducing some terrorist to his seventy-two appointed hotties. And it's downright creepy that colleges have been turning a buck off of pushing the pill. Talk about your perverse incentives.

[Kozak]

So drink a couple less Latte’s and skip one kegger. Quit your bitchin woman. We don’t owe you cheap birth control pills.

[AwesomePossum]

"Maybe, if more people switch from hormonal methods to condoms, we may see a positive outcome of fewer STI's," says Mary Hoban, a project director for the American College Health Association. "But from a contraceptive standpoint, we may see more unintended pregnancy. It's a double-edged sword."

Most doctors know that condoms are among the least effective methods of birth control, and yet they prescribe condoms for disease control.............some of the diseases are incurable, and some are deadly.............condoms are only a delaying mechanism, as they fail, on average, about 16 per cent of the time, for various reasons..........

Every year here in America, millions of youth and young adults contract a new (to them) sexually transmitted disease (STD)..............most are spread by some type of sexual contact; some diseases can be spread just by kissing an infected person (herpes1, herpes2, hepatitis, meningitis, to name a few)............

The left has sexed our nation's youth and young adults with their Rx's for birth control and disease control (the pill/abortion and condoms), and every year more and more of our nation's children are afflicted, some for life, some with their life ended...............and our tax money is helping to fund all of this............

I am reminded of a study (years ago) of several married couples, each couple having one person infected with HIV. They were to use condoms to check the spread of the HIV from one spouse to the other spouse...............last I heard, ALL of those who did not have HIV had contracted HIV from their HIV infected spouse..........