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Thank You New York Attorney General Schneiderman For Stepping Up To Protect Our Birth Control!
This morning, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman introduced the Comprehensive Contraception Coverage Act of 2017 (CCCA)—a bill that protects and enhances New Yorkers’ access to insurance coverage of birth control without additional cost.
Schneiderman’s bill is particularly timely, as certain members in Congress are charging ahead with repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. The ACA included a ground-breaking provision requiring all insurance plans to cover a set of evidence-based women’s preventive services, including birth control without any cost-sharing.  Women have reaped significant savings as a result of this provision.  In fact, in just one year, women saved $1.4 billion on birth control pills alone.
The CCCA would enshrine this birth control benefit in New York state law so that regardless of what happens at the federal level, women in New York will continue to have access to birth control with no out of pocket costs.
The CCCA also improves upon the ACA and existing state law by prohibiting insurance companies from imposing other unnecessary burdens and delays that limit access to birth control, by covering men’s birth control methods (such as male condoms), and allowing women to receive a year’s worth of birth control at one time.
Birth control access is key to women’s health and economic security. The ability of women to plan and space their pregnancies through access to birth control is linked to greater educational and professional opportunities and increased lifetime earnings.  Children whose mothers had access to birth control have higher family incomes and college completion rates. Birth control is also used to manage and treat various health conditions.
By introducing the CCCA, New York is recognizing the importance of birth control for women’s health and economic security, and joining other states that are already stepping up to protect and improve access to birth control. If the New York legislature passes the CCCA, it will join states including California, Illinois, Maryland, and Vermont, which have already passed laws to enshrine the ACA’s birth control benefit into state law and remove barriers to birth control access.
