“Pills or dinner?” was the subject heading of Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards’ email alert yesterday.
The premise is ridiculous: that due to rising prices of artificial female steroids, i.e., birth control pills, college nyphomaniacs are being forced to choose between illicit sex and eating.
bc pp.jpgHere’s what happened. Legislators passed the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 to save $40 billion over 5 years. A consequence, according to U.S. News & World Report:

A quirk in a new federal law, designed to save taxpayers money on Medicaid reimbursements for drugs, has effectively persuaded pharmaceutical companies to stop selling their products to these [university] pharmacies at deeply discounted rates. (If companies continue to offer such discounts, the law stipulates, they will also receive lower payments from Medicaid.)

Shock: the government isn’t buying the whining. In response to one request to restore the loophole, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid wrote, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

We believe that there are already programs in place by which manufacturers can continue to make available drugs to the indigent and underinsured …

Absolutely true.
One school, Carnegie Mellon, switched to offering generics, which cost about 1/4 what brand names do.
Why doesn’t PP go the generics route? Because it wouldn’t make as much profit, perhaps?
Anyway, here’s Cecile’s letter. Note the sexism. She places the entire financial responsibility for contraception on women. Why doesn’t she demand that studs subsidize their sexual proclivities rather than see their muses starve to death?
Thanks to the spike in bc costs, another spike we may see here is in grades, the reason people attended college originally.
pp cecile pill.jpg
[HT: John Jansen of Pro-Life Action League]

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