The (New) High Cost of Choice
Monday, July 7th, 2008Hi, folks. As Julie mentioned in her intro post, I’ll be guest blogging at Repo Repro this summer while she masters the bar exam. A little about me: I’m headed into my second year at UC Davis School of Law (King Hall) and will be co-chairing my LSRJ chapter for the 2008-2009 academic year. I’m also a news junkie, and blogging is one of the things I do for fun (yeah, huge nerd here) so I’m thrilled to have an opportunity to apply those dubious talents for a good cause. Thanks for reading!
–Erin Simonitch
Small changes can make a big difference.
It’s a principle that helps sustain and hearten those of us committed to social justice. Without it, the magnitude of the work would overwhelm us. But it’s a double-edged sword, because the principle operates whether the change is for better or for worse. So it’s also why law schools drill “baby lawyers” to obsess over details and precise wording. Use the wrong language in a contract agreement, leave out an important detail, fail to thoroughly define your terms, and sooner or later the consequences will explode into thousands of dollars of unnecessary expenses, while you’re stuck in court debating the meaning of the word “chicken.” (As my property professor likes to point out, litigators exist to clean up other lawyers’ messes.)
Members of Congress demonstrated their failure to understand this concept when they passed the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act, making a small change in federal Medicaid law that has a big impact on young women’s access to contraceptives. Before the Act’s passage, pharmaceutical companies could and did offer hormonal contraceptives at significant discounts. But in drafting the new rules for calculating Medicaid rebates, lawmakers left out a provision that would have preserved those discounts for campus health centers. Now, pharm companies must sell contraceptives to clinics at higher prices or suffer a financial penalty–a “business decision” that’s all too easily made by corporations for whom the bottom line is, well, the bottom line.
The result, of course, is that students pay the price. Contraceptive costs have risen dramatically on college and university campuses, sometimes as much as 500%.
It’s now well established that abstinence only “education” programs