An incident at the drugstore, and the answer to the Little Sisters issue

Last updated on: January 16, 2016 at 1:30 pm by Jane the Actuary

An incident at the drugstore, and the answer to the Little Sisters issue 2016-01-16T13:30:04-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AOpened_Oral_Birth_Control.jpg

. . . if the Obama administration truly cared about respecting religious accommodation, that is.

Anyway, at the start of the new year, we changed insurance. It’s yet another indicator of the dysfunction of the entire system that every year a different plan comes out having significantly lower premiums, where insurance companies would be better off with building brand loyalty, and, having stability in their customers, investing in health-improvement initiatives even if they only pay off in the long term. But they don’t.

We also, as a consequence of my son’s broken arm over the summer, hit the deductible, so I was trying to fill some prescriptions at the last minute. Unfortuately, long story short, they weren’t able to fill the prescriptions until after the new year, so when I went in today to pick them up, I was ready to show them the new insurance card, and have it run through the new insurance, expecting that when the pharmacist tech had previously put it in their system, we would have shown up as uninsured, so the retail price would have been listed.

But we didn’t, and it wasn’t. This astonished me — their computer databases had enough information to link us to our new insurer and policy number. Could my kids’ pediatrician have done this, too, rather than the laborious perpetual entering of insurance information? I don’t know. Perhaps the systems at pharmacies are different.

But in any case, that means that there is a very simple means of providing free contraceptives to women whose employers object for religious or moral reasons, a means that wholly removes them from the process: code into the system, in the same manner as formulary/nonformulary and negotiated discounts are coded, a code that simply says “not covered.” And then, when a woman with such a coverage seeks to fill a prescription, simply switch to a government entity as the provider — which sure as heck ought to be a dirt-simple process, if they were able to seamlessly switch our data to the new insurer. (I raised this over the summer, but it seems even clearer to me now that this is, or should be, the solution.)

As a bonus, the prescribing information will state that the pills were funded by the Federal Agency for the Provision of No-Out-of-Pocket-Cost Contraceptives, or whatever you want to call it, to further disconnect the Sisters.

Are “free pills” supporters afraid that some women, somewhere, will be told by their Catholic employers, “we don’t cover contraception,” without being informed enough to know that they’ll get government-provided coverage if they walk into the pharmacy? That only if their employer provides a notice on the bulletin board will they know? — that they won’t hear from their doctor, or from a notice at the drugstore, or from a viral post on facebook? That’s not a good enough reason to oblige objecting employers to be a part of the process.

So there you go. Easy-peasy. Non-burdensome. Why not?

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