Mandating Prescription Contraception Coverage Eff

Authors: Kerri M Raissian Leonard M Lopoo

Publish Date: 2014/12/14

Volume: 34, Issue: 4, Pages: 481-510

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Abstract

While recent national discussions of the Affordable Care Act ACA made the introduction of mandated contraceptive coverage within health insurance policies seem like a novel idea it is not new at all Since the late 1990s 29 states have mandated that insurance providers include prescription contraceptive supplies and in some instances associated contraceptive services in their coverage We use statelevel policy variation to generate both differenceindifferences and triple difference estimates to determine if women in states with statelevel contraception supply or contraception supply and services insurance mandates experienced changes in their utilization of contraception and preventive health care services We find a positive relationship between these policies and prescription contraception use for those with low educational attainment but the results are not robust to a variety of specifications Our results also show an increase in the consumption of preventive health services for women with low educational attainment as a result of these health insurance mandates We conclude by discussing the implications for the ACAWe thank Ted Joyce and participants at the 2012 APPAM Fall Conference the Center for Policy Research Seminar Series at Syracuse University and the Cornell Population Center/Aging Studies Institute Encore Conference for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper We also thank Melissa Kearney for sharing her data on Medicaid waivers Emily Cardon and Lincoln Groves provided excellent research assistance A portion of this research was carried out at a US Census Bureau Research Data Center facility in Ithaca NY We thank Warren Brown Andrew Green and Evan Buntrock at the NYCRDC and Nataliya Kravets at NCHS for their help with these confidential data These results have been screened by the National Center of Health Statistics NCHS to avoid revealing confidential data The results and conclusions of the paper are those of the authors and do not indicate concurrence by the Census Bureau or NCHS

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