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President Trump Doesn’t Want You to Know that Two Million More Women Have Birth Control Coverage Thanks to the ACA
Update: With updated data from the Census, we’ve recalculated our estimate. We now estimate that over 62.4 million women have coverage of birth control without out-of-pocket costs.
Today we released a new estimate showing that 57.6 million women now have coverage of birth control and other preventive services without out-of-pocket costs because of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Usually, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) calculates these estimates, most recently in May 2015 when it estimated 55.6 million women had this coverage. But, the Trump Administration hasn’t updated these numbers since they took charge over at HHS, so we decided to do it for them. And low and behold, look what our amazing team of number crunchers found: two million more women getting insurance coverage of birth control without the out-of-pocket costs that can be a barrier for so many people.
Not publicly updating these numbers isn’t an oversight by the Trump Administration. They want to convince you that the ACA is failing, but it isn’t. These increases in preventive services coverage are part of the ACA’s success story. They don’t want to remind you of the birth control benefit and how much you like – especially the two million of you who just gained this coverage in the last two years.
The Trump Administration may want Congress to repeal the ACA, and it may try to roll back the birth control benefit, but data doesn’t lie. In the midst of this dumpster fire of a week, let’s take a moment to revel in how awesome this increase is.