The Economy Cant Grow Without Birth Control
I just do not understand why trump put in this new rule. it is cruel. just plain cruel
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/opinion/economy-birth-control.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region
The Economy Can’t Grow Without Birth Control
Oct 29, 2017
Bryce Covert
This month, 41 Democrats introduced a bill with a simple mission: It would undo the Trump administration’s recent change to the Affordable Care Act that paves the way for virtually any employer to deny its employees access to contraception without a co-payment. Before President Trump’s new guidance, the law required nearly all employers to offer workers health insurance plans that include contraception without cost. But the new rules, effective immediately after the announcement, allow any employer to request that the government let it opt out based on religious or moral objections.
In a statement on the bill, Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, said that “birth control is about being healthy and financially secure.”
Indeed, while access to contraception is clearly about women’s health, it also profoundly affects the economy.........................................
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For individual women, this is certainly about their wallets. The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that health insurance offer birth control without cost-sharing has resulted in an estimated 57.6 million American women getting contraception without a co-payment. That has saved them a huge amount of money: $1.4 billion in 2013 alone.
The ability to opt out of offering no-cost contraception, then, is not just about religious objections. Obamacare lifted an enormous financial burden that women alone had to bear. Before the A.C.A., 85 percent of health insurance plans at large companies offered contraceptive coverage, but most required at least a co-payment. Individual women paid about $250 a year. Now the president has given insurance companies a way out of taking on that burden.
The Trump administration has tried to reassure women that they can still get inexpensive birth control, asserting that “many forms of contraception are available for around $50 a month.” Even if that’s the case, $50 a month — $600 a year — is no small item in many people’s budgets, particularly for the women who make up a majority of low-wage workers. As the Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has pointed out, the cost of an intrauterine device, one of the most effective forms of contraception, is about the same as a month’s minimum-wage pay.
This doesn’t just matter to individual women. Consumer spending makes up about 70 percent of all economic growth, and women are responsible for an outsize portion of that spending. Billions of dollars less a year in their pockets means billions of dollars less that they could spend on goods other than birth control, dampening their ability to support businesses and the economy.
But a larger economic impact of reconstructing a cost barrier to contraception is likely to be felt throughout the entire work force. High birth rates have historically lowered women’s ability to get and keep paid work, which isn’t so hard to understand — holding down a job becomes a lot more difficult when it has to be balanced with pregnancies and raising children. That’s particularly true if women aren’t even in control of when they become pregnant.
On the other hand, a raft of evidence has definitively found that when women gained greater access to the pill in the late 1960s and early ’70s, they were able to delay marriage and childbirth and invest in careers through education, job training and staying in paid work.................................
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