Study highlights how women's choice of birth control is affected by out-of-pocket costs
Getting a birth control implant used to cost some women hundreds of dollars, if they were among the nearly half of privately insured Americans covered by a health plan with a high deductible that they were responsible for paying.
But a new study in the April issue of
Health Affairs shows that after the Affordable Care Act's no-cost birth control provision took effect in 2013, women in these high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) opted for long-acting contraception even more than women with other types of health plans.
The study's findings have important policy implications, because employers now have the ability to opt out of the birth control portion of the ACA, following a Supreme Court case decided in 2020. Many employers have shifted to HDHPs to hold down their overall health benefit costs.