New Requirement of Insurance Coverage Without Co-Pay for Preventive Care Not Likely to Include Contraception Until 2013

Slate Magazine (Double X): Yes, You Will Keep Paying for Birth Control, by Sharon Lerner:

Finally, the day has come when all new insurance plans are required to cover preventive health care without any co-payments or deductibles. But despite reassurances from Congress and the White House that birth control would be covered under health reform, it didn’t make the list of essential preventive services. Instead, all anyone could promise was a future “study.”

Comissioned by Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the study is supposed to determine whether contraception is, in fact, a preventive health service. Allowing a year for the research, which is due next August, then additional time to issue new regulations, and, after that, a year in which insurers will have to comply with new regulations, it’ll be at least 2012 before women can get birth control without a hefty co-pay. 2013 is more likely. . . .