The health care reform bill requires insurers to provide “preventative health services” without additional charge. An independent panel has been recruited to decide which services count as “preventative.” The Obama administration says it expects contraception to be among them.

The Editorial Board supports the Obama administration’s position. Birth control is an essential component of a healthy life for many women who choose or are advised by their doctors to use it.

A predictable but menacing opposition is forming around the issue.

The members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Family Research Council have thrown their weight behind insurance companies, saying companies should not be forced to violate their consciences in providing contraceptives.

Where, one might ask, was all this talk of the insurance companies’ consciences when they were denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions? The controversy is once again illustrative of the disturbing chasm between the compassion certain groups feel toward fetuses versus fully formed human beings.

Some may question whether birth control is properly “preventative” medicine. A spokesperson for the Catholic Bishops, for example, claimed that pregnancy is not a disease to be prevented.

We should be wary of defining disease too narrowly. If one of your limbs, for example, were amputated in an accident, you would not exactly suffer from a disease, but you would expect your medical insurance to pay for your expensive medical condition. Health insurance covers a wide range of conditions that require professional medical attention. Pregnancy should be one of them.

Unfortunately, it’s not. Currently, many individual insurance plans can refuse coverage or charge higher premiums to pregnant women. And such denials won’t be illegal until a provision of the Health Care Reform takes effect in 2014.

The costs of any pregnancy are high. Parenting Weekly estimates that prenatal care and delivery cost, on average, is between $6,800 and $10,600. Women should have access to the drugs that help them avoid the expense and dangers of pregnancy if they choose.

But pregnancy is not the only condition women use birth control to prevent. Many women find that the pill alleviates menstrual cramps and especially heavy or irregular periods.

Just like a good insurance plan pays not only for your cavity to be filled but also for bi-annual cleanings at the dentist’s office that help you avoid cavities, that insurance should not only help you with the expenses of delivering a baby, but also with your decision not to become pregnant if you are unwilling or unable to raise the child.

This is no longer a question of whether private insurance companies can be forced to provide certain preventative coverage. They already have been.

Now, contraceptives’ opponents can only try to justify excluding a central component of women’s health from receiving equal medical treatment.

DISSENT by Jarrod Lowery
Preventive methods of birth control can be both useful and beneficial for many women, but using last year’s health care reform act to require insurance companies to provide them to women is not the best way to expand access to these methods.

Doing so would worsen two related problems that urgently need to be addressed.

First, it would create additional incentives for people to consume more health-related services than they would if they were not largely insulated from the costs of their consumption by our current insurance-based system. Such overconsumption, of course, is a major contributor to rising costs.

Second, it would further entrench last year’s reform package in our health care system, which would needlessly complicate the necessary process of replacing the law with one that actually addresses the root cause of our health care woes — the practice of financing health care with insurance instead of using insurance only for catastrophic problems.

Since Congress won’t be able to repeal and replace last year’s reforms any time soon (thanks to the president’s veto power), a good first step would be to reduce the regulatory barriers that delay promising new drugs from being brought to market.