Scorecard evaluates family planning policies across the U.S.
There are “two different Americas” with regard to birth control, according to family planning experts.
A new report reveals that only a third of states protect access to affordable contraception through their policies, such as the expansion of Medicaid or forcing health insurers to pay for prescriptions for months at a time.
The report, published on Wednesday, analyzed current birth control policies in the 50 states and Washington, DC, it has come to find affordable birth control becomes more difficult for many women across the country and as conservative state and federal legislators seek to limit access to certain forms of contraception.
The report – a dashboard of state contraceptive policy by state – shows how important local legislation is for family planning and health care.
“Seeing the full table in the 50 states and DC has really solidified how uneven access is,” said Christine Power, a political advisor for the population’s reference office, a non -profit organization that analyzes population data from around the world and has published the report.
The report has revealed that policies at the state level are generally distributed in three categories of access:
- Affordability. The dashboard has followed whether the states have expanded Medicaid or promulgated policies which oblige insurers to fully cover contraception. Medicaid is the main source of financing for family planning services for low -income persons, according to KFF, a research group on non -profit health policies. Previous research has indicated that in states that have expanded access to Medicaid, the number of contraception prescriptions has increased.
- Availability. Researchers examine That states authorize qualified health workers who are not doctors, such as pharmacists, to provide birth control and if they have widened access to emergency contraception, as well as forcing health insurers to cover longer contraceptive supplies for several months or up to one year.
- Health care environment. The dashboard has measured if the public schools of the State teach a medically precise and complete sex education and if the parents can withdraw from the lessons for their children. Birth control restrictions include if minors are able to obtain birth control without parental authorization and whether doctors or pharmacists are authorized to refuse birth control prescriptions according to personal beliefs.
“Affordability policies had the biggest access weight, which was greater than access policies,” said Power. Power said she was surprised by the number of states that have marked badly, not necessarily because they are very restrictive to family planning care, but because they “simply did not act at all”.
Power and his team evaluated how policies at the state level changed access to each state, both and when they were superimposed with others. They found that 16 states and Washington, DC, birth control made easily accessible and affordable. Sixteen restricted access and 18 fell in the middle.
The 16 states of protection had one thing in common: they had adopted the expansion of Medicaid through the Act respecting affordable care, which allowed the states to extend the coverage of Medicaid to more low -income adults. None of the 16 restrictive states – including Alabama, Florida, Kansas, Mississippi and Wyoming, which have ranked the highest – Enlarge Medicaid.
States with the most favorable environment for birth control are California, Connecticut, Maryland, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington.
The 18 states that fell into the average category lasted the political spectrum, red states reliably like Virginia-Western to liberal bastions such as Massachusetts.
“Your context at the level of the state is really important for what your access to contraception looks like. This is particularly true for vulnerable people, for people who are under public or public health insurance and for minors who do not say so many in their health care,” said Leslie Root, an associate director of the CU Population Center of the University of Colorado Boulder, which was not involved in the report.
Root said that the report offers a good synthesis of the legal obstacle layers that play to find out if a person may or not obtain birth control. It can go from what students learn contraception at school, to know if they can obtain a supply in 12 months of contraception or if they can obtain the type of contraception that suits them best.
“People can really live in two different Americas,” said Root. “This is a very austere illustration of this.”
