by Jennifer LaBorde ¦ University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh Avance-Titan ¦ 3 December 2007

College students have many decisions to make regarding how to spend often-limited funds. Though groceries and textbooks sometimes take a back seat to gasoline and alcohol, for the most part students begin learning a valuable lesson on budgeting and saving. 
        
Sometimes choices are made for us—they are dictated by price and need. When a high price conflicts with a high need, the decision is harder to make; and when the decision concerns something that thousands of women on this campus rely on for protection, the decision can be impossible to make. 
        
Contraception costs on this campus have soared higher and higher starting at the beginning of this semester. Depending on the prescription and method, women who purchase birth control at the UW-Oshkosh health center are paying as high as $50 each month for protection. 
        
In Wisconsin, popular contraception brands like Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo and Nuva Ring have risen from an average of $15 per pack to $30 or $40 per month. 
        
Costs haven’t always been this high, and the price range has nothing to do with what drug companies demand. There was a recent modification in federal law that changed how drug manufacturers and health centers interacted. Previously, drug manufacturers provided prescription contraception to health centers at vastly discounted rates. After the change, health centers no longer enjoy those discounted rates—and neither do students.  The new rules are part of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, a bill that attempted to reduce abuse within Medicare. Despite the design of the bill, it has had negative affects for many who were abiding by the system and rightfully taking advantage of its services. 
        
It is a sometimes confusing and jumbled system. Drug manufacturers pay rebates to states for prescription drugs that are covered by Medicaid. Rebates are determined through calculations, and drug manufactures did not have to calculate the discounts for birth control. The arrangement helped those with the least amount of money to receive birth control at a lower cost without further disadvantaging drug companies.   
        
Many make the point that drug companies were denied a rapt and profitable audience because they were forced to charge a discounted rate. That said, what legislators must understand, is that the bottom line in this situation is not profit; the bottom line is that there is a social need to protect women who are at a low, fixed income from becoming pregnant. 
        
Women who have unexpected pregnancies, specifically those who are already disadvantaged because of a low income, become a burden on the health care system. The prior arrangement worked towards protecting the system and women from that costly situation. 
        
Students in Wisconsin have it better off than students in many other states, as Wisconsin is one of 24 states that participate in the Medicaid family planning waiver. The family planning waiver is available to lower income women from the ages of 15 to 44 and provides free reproductive services, including exams, birth control, pregnancy testing and condoms. 
        
Applications for the family planning waiver are available at the university health center, and there are knowledgeable workers who help students through the application process. Students who qualify or do not have insurance must make use of this beneficial program. 
        
Some legislators said that community and student health centers were not supposed to be exempt from the discounted rate. The current legislation was passed to reduce abuse in rebate calculations, but when drug manufactures told college clinics that they would no longer receive the discounts, legislators realized the oversight. 
        
There is a current push to change the law, and some hope it happens by the end of this year. A change needs to reverse the price increase. A proposal has been made by Rep. Joseph Crowley, a Democrat from New York, who wants to have drug manufacturers pay for discounts, as they had before, but said that the manufacturers would not be required to pay for those discounts in their Medicaid rebates. This is the same situation that both drug companies and poor women enjoyed prior to the system change. There would be no tax increase related to this change. 
        
Students have limited funds and that has been a constant since the university system began. While the decision on how to allocate those funds is a daily decision for all, when that decision cuts out contraception, students and the healthcare system enter a situation that is much too costly.