Originally Posted by
ApatheticNoMore
people may not make the best decisions for them financially or otherwise if paying out of pocket. Even to figure birth control costs over years of use you have to look at years of use, but if it has an high initial cost (say several hundred for an IUD etc.. which still makes it cheap given the lifespan of the devices) people don't always, they just go for what's cheap now, and that isn't just their bone-headedness, in many cases it's simply because they don't have the money up front at all.
So that's kind of the whole point of having some kind of health coverage. So the birth control mandates pretty much enabled women who wouldn't be able to have free choice of birth control to have it without worrying about costs, but again they were absolutely not making sensible long term decisions based on costs before they were merely optimizing short term affordability. So the mandate opens up choices and affordability. Why cover pregnancy and not birth control anyway? That really makes no sense.