White House sticking to contraception plan

President Barack Obama will not make any more changes to the rule announced last week requiring health insurance plans to provide women with coverage for contraception, although U.S. Catholic bishops have said it violates the Church's religious principles.

"We put out the plan that reflects where the president intended to go. This is our plan," White House chief of staff Jacob Lew said on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.

Lew said no religious organization will be required to pay for or facilitate the coverage that it disagrees with since the insurance companies are the ones who will pay.

Asked what incentive insurance companies would have to provide contraception, Lew - Obama's budget director until a few weeks ago - said it would be cost effective just like other preventive healthcare coverage.

"As somebody who's done budgets for a lot of years, when people tell me things don't cost money, I ask a lot of questions," Lew said on ABC News's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos".

"This is actually one of those exceptions to the rule. If you look at the overall cost of providing healthcare to a woman, the cost goes up, not down, if you take contraceptives out."

Insurance Coverage of Contraceptives

While almost all insurance plans cover prescription drugs, some still do not provide
coverage for the range of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–approved prescription contraceptive drugs
and devices. More than half of states, however, require insurance policies that cover other prescription drugs to
also cover all FDA-approved contraceptive drugs and devices, as well as related medical services. Some of these
state policies allow employers or insurers to refuse to cover contraceptives on religious or moral grounds. Other
states have limited mandates requiring coverage of contraception that apply to either specific types of insurers,
such as health maintenance organizations (HMOs), or coverage written for a segment of the insurance market.

In 2011, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) adopted recommendations for women’s
preventive health care issued by the Institute of Medicine. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of
2010, drawing on these recommendations, requires new private health plans written on or after August 1, 2012 to
cover contraceptive counseling and services and all FDA-approved methods without out-of-pocket costs to
patients. However, existing plans are exempt from the requirement so long as no significant negative changes,
such as cutting benefits or raising cost-sharing, are made to them; DHHS has said that most of these plans willlikely lose this protected status within a few years. The agency has also proposed an exemption for some religiousemployers, similar to the exemption included in several state laws.