INDIANAPOLIS – A dispute about whether birth control causes abortions, plus fallout from a pricey Medicaid forecasting error, colored debate over a bill meant to help women on Medicaid access long-acting contraceptives.
A finance-focused Senate committee on Thursday advanced the proposal promoting subdermal birth control implants but declined to similarly push intrauterine devices (IUDs). The devices were removed in January after a dispute about whether they were abortifacients.
That split House and Senate Democrats on the bill. The Senate Appropriations Committee leader also balked at the projected sticker price.
Rep. Rita Fleming, an obstetric hospitalist from Jeffersonville, filed House Bill 1426 to require that hospitals offer long-acting, reversible contraceptives to women on Medicaid, or who are eligible for it, after childbirth. The state would reimburse hospitals for the service.
Fleming, a Democrat, said about 30% of women don’t return for postpartum check-ups, and that percentage is higher for women who don’t get prenatal care. That’s why, she said, her legislation used birth as a “window of opportunity to offer these women reliable birth control.”
The mandate would begin July 1, 2024, and would expire June 30, 2025, under an amendment Sen. Ryan Mishler, R-Mishawaka, brought Thursday. Lawmakers would have to reauthorize it during next year’s budget-centric legislative session.
Mishler, who’s long expressed concerns on the state’s growing Medicaid costs, has kicked cost-saving efforts up a gear following a $1 billion forecasting blunder. He chairs the Senate’s appropriates panel.
Fleming’s bill could cost the state from $10,000 to nearly $90,000, according to a fiscal analysis by the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency.
Sen. Shelli Yoder, D-Bloomington, argued that the bill is a “minor” expense — the state’s last biennial budget totaled $44 billion — and said she expected to be “in the same place … fighting for access to birth control” next year.
House Bill 1426 sailed through the House on a bipartisan vote of 94-4 and was set for a smooth ride through the Senate.
Upon switching chambers, however, Fleming’s legislation was mired in controversy stemming from a change made weeks earlier. Rep. Cindy Ledbetter, R-Newburgh, amended the legislation in the House’s Public Health Committee to specify that hospitals must discuss a subdermal implant with patients — leaving out IUDs as a required discussion topic.
Ledbetter said she brought the amendment because Indiana Right to Life raised concerns that IUDs induce abortion,
Contraceptive-rights entities sounded the alarm. In a letter to Statehouse Democrats, Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates of Indiana said it was concerned anti-abortion sentiment was “infiltrat(ing)” the legislation and called the absence of IUDs a “slippery slope of anti-science … attacks on contraceptives.”
In a rare show of disunity with their House counterparts, Senate Democrats have pushed to require physicians to talk about all long-acting, reversible contraceptives, like IUDs. Yoder offered an amendment Thursday striking language specifying subdermal implants; it failed along party lines.
Continue reading the story by Leslie Bonilla Muñiz for the Indiana Capital Chronicle, here.
