Contraception X Article: Out-of-Pocket Spending for Oral Contraceptives Among Women with Private Insurance Coverage After the Affordable Care Act

The Affordable Care Act’s preventive care provisions eliminated out-of-pockets costs for contraception for many insured women, but some are still paying these out-of-pocket costs.

In an article for Contraception: X, KFF’s Brittni Frederiksen, Matthew Rae, and Alina Salganicoff examine large employer plans to identify which types and brands of oral contraceptive pills have the largest shares of oral contraceptive users with out-of-pocket spending and which oral contraceptives have the highest average annual out-of-pocket costs.

The authors found 10% of oral contraceptive users in large employer plans still had out-of-pocket costs in 2018.

Brand name oral contraceptives with generic alternatives had the largest share of users with annual out-of-pocket spending and the three drugs with highest average annual out-of-pocket spending were brand names without generic alternatives.