The recent price jumps in birth control products for women are probably due to a new wave of those products hitting pharmacy shelves, experts say.
"The company that develops those products is trying to recoup their costs for research and development," said Lori Lamerand, vice president of the Planned Parenthood Mid-Michigan Alliance. "Once the products are on the market for a while, the costs will begin to come back down."
A slew of new products constantly is being marketed to women. Women can try the Nuvaring, a 2-inch-in-diameter ring inserted once a month into the vagina, or the patch, which is worn three weeks out of the month on almost any part of the body. Both release hormones into the body without the woman having to take a pill.
Some birth controls are coming out with effects that lower estrogen levels, such as OrthoTriCyclen Lo, which markets birth control toward younger women.
"It's the old favorite in new packaging," Lamerand said. "It's the same birth control method in new forms."
Lamerand said all the new products did help lower the prices of some other kinds of the pill, specifically OrthoTriCyclen, which went generic, automatically causing prices to drop.
Olin Health Center spokeswoman Kathi Braunlich said Olin had to increase prices starting March 15 to compensate for the hikes.
In mid-December, the companies Olin purchases pre-packaged birth control through began to increase prices by as much as 500 percent, Braunlich said.
"It's an industrywide shift," she said. "We would've been selling everything at a loss if costs hadn't risen.
"We've held off the price increases as long as we could."
Lamerand said the industry price increases don't hit Planned Parenthood as hard because the organization operates under Title X, a government program that allows them federal funding and a contract.
"We're a national organization. We buy more birth control than anyone in the world, so we have a contract that allows us to get things at a relatively low price."
She said Planned Parenthood didn't go completely unharmed - costs did rise about 38 percent for the organization from 2002 to 2003.
Some women find it especially frustrating when costs rise because many health insurance companies don't cover birth control unless it's needed for medical reasons, such as excessive cramping.
"If they're going to cover Viagra, which isn't even really necessary, they should cover birth control," education sophomore Jenny Bibbler said. "People are going to have sex whether they're on birth control or not. And if they can't afford it, they're not going to use it.
"It just makes sense."
