From day one of my career as an obstetrician/ gynecologist, I have seen women and their families suffer when insurers withhold coverage for contraceptives or charge extra fees [“Guidelines target women’s health,” news story, July 20]. Forced to forgo prescription birth control or accept less effective methods, women come to me pregnant after they and their partners were trying to avoid that outcome.
Every day I see another patient who has delayed care or made mistakes because the cost of routine preventive services, contraception or counseling was beyond her means. Last Tuesday, two of my patients were diagnosed with unplanned pregnancies. The incidences and costs of unintended pregnancy can be reduced by prevention.
The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences has given me hope, recommending that insurers cover in full all contraceptives approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Now it’s up to the Department of Health and Human Services to make sure my insured patients don’t have to gamble with their reproductive lives.
Sara L. Imershein, Washington
The writer is a fellow at Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health.
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●Discarding consideration of both cost and conscientious objections, the Obama administration appears poised to adopt a radical advisory board recommendation: that the federal government must pay for or force others to pay for ethically controversial contraceptive drugs.
Included in the indiscriminate mandate would be controversial drugs such as ella (ulipristal acetate) and the “morning-after pill” (levonorgestrel). Food and Drug Administration labels note that these drugs “may inhibit implantation” of a living human embryo. Since many physicians, patients, employers and even some insurers adhere to life-affirming ethical standards, they cannot in good conscience participate in prescribing, taking or paying for such drugs. This mandate offers them no alternative.
That’s obviously of scant concern to the administration, which has gutted the only federal regulation protecting conscientious medical professionals from job-ending discrimination. Nor does the administration consider consequential the additional cost to taxpayers and potentially business-killing burdens that this overbearing policy will bring.
Time and again, confronted with protests that the government cannot continue to willfully disregard cost and conscience, this president audaciously answers, “Yes, we can.”
Jonathan Imbody, Ashburn
The writer is vice president for government relations of the Christian Medical Association and director of Freedom2Care.
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