 "Photo: Paul Wentzell")
Students reeling from the skyrocketing costs of name brand birth control on college campuses did not get any relief from Congress, which last week rejected proposed changes to the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005.
The act, which aimed to curb unnecessary federal spending, effective at the beginning of this year, removed incentives for pharmaceutical companies to offer lower prices to colleges. This caused several companies, including Johnson & Johnson, the company that makes Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo, to cancel their contracts with the University, which led to stockpiling and rationing of the remaining doses of the drugs.
"I tried to stockpile as best as I could," said Sharon Roberson, chief of pharmacy services at UT. "We limited the number that people could have each month. We just ran out on July 7."
But some students were willing to pay more money to have a longer supply of birth control.
"I stopped going to the health center, because I wanted to switch medications, and because they would only give you a month at a time," elementary education senior Christina Hays said.
Once the supplies ran out, students faced the decision of whether to pay for name brand drugs, which can cost as much as $50, or go generic for about half the price.
Before the act went into effect, drug manufacturers were required to offer the best possible price on drugs to Medicaid recipients. Under the old rules, university clinic drug prices were exempt from this policy. The act revoked the exemption, mandating that their sales figures go into the best-price calculations.
"The companies had to alter their best-price calculations to include the colleges' prices," said Mary Kahn, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. "The university clinics aren't venues that serve people on Medicaid; they don't anyway."
But now, instead of lowering the prices for Medicaid recipients to match the prices for college students, the companies have raised the prices at college clinics to save money.
The proposed changes would have re-imposed the exemption of university clinics, bringing name brand contraceptive prices back down. When they failed, it meant that the high cost of some birth control drugs was here to stay.
But Roberson said the staff at University Health Services has been preparing for this news since December.
"We were working proactively to make sure no one was caught in the middle," she said. "It's not a crisis for us. We've worked hard to solve it before it became a problem."
Roberson also said that out of the 50 contraceptives available at UHS, only two drugs, Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo and the NuvaRing, don't have generic counterparts.
"People were usually willing to switch to a generic medication," Roberson said.
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