The right-wing noise machine has attempted to make the contraception argument about who "pays" for birth control, and Rush Limbaugh and commenters on Fox have gone so far as to claim that contraception advocates "want me to pay for them to have sex."
The debate was instigated by concerns at Georgetown University, a Catholic institution that does not provide contraception through their student health insurance program.
It is shocking to discover, then, that undergraduate students pay over $1800 per year for health insurance.
Until we get single payer, taxpayer-funded insurance for all, health insurance will continue to be a product that is bought and sold in the marketplace. Health insurance reform breaks up monopolies in that area and also regulates abuses from the sale of that insurance product. It is not out of line to compare the health insurance product to the car insurance product. (Except for the little inconvenient fact that people without health insurance are not as healthy and are more likely to die due to lack of medical care.) If I buy a car and insurance for it, I'm going to buy collision insurance. I'm not going to buy a policy that doesn't have collision insurance attached to it, and by the way insurance LAW says I can't anyway. I have to have that coverage. Now, because I have a womb and ovaries, the healthcare reform law says I have to have health coverage for those organs, and that insurance companies and employers can't separate them out from the total person and not cover them because any person who uses those organs outside of a specific religious dictum is a "slut." Sorry, boys, "sluts" who pay for their health insurance get covered same as anybody.
Couples of family-bearing age and yes, young women who are FERTILE, use birth control for family planning. Even in an unregulated market, husbands and wives, men and the women who love them, are not going to buy an insurance policy that does not cover that medicine. And now the laws regulating health insurance says that that medicine has to be covered, because NOT covering it is discriminating against women simply because they have reproductive organs that get them pregnant.
Finally, this is a non-issue. Blue Cross covers birth control pills, diaphragms, hormone implants, the whole shebang because it's good business.
Birth control coverage is WAY cheaper than paying for baby deliveries and it's more profitable to offer policies that cover birth control. That's only going to be more pervasive when everyone has to buy coverage and these exchanges allow insurance companies to compete on the open market (which was at one time the Republican idea for health insurance reform). Insurance companies will be tripping over their own reproductive organs to tell women that they cover not only birth control, but private birthing facilities, annual Ob/GYN and mammogram visits, etc., because that is good marketing to customers and means more money for them.
Congratulations, libertarians! When it comes to buying a product that serves the needs of the customer versus obeying an artificial moral dictum brought out by hypocrites like Limbaugh? Capitalism wins every time.
