This is one of the e-cards available on President Obama’s campaign site:

This probably includes to cost of a smoke afterwards.

$18,000?!?! That’s a whole lot of birth control.

So let’s break it down.

Let’s assume that the young lady in question, and we will call her Julia, goes on the pill when she’s legal and enters college at the ripe old age of 18. Let us also assume that she is destined to go through ‘the change of life’ as Mama J. would call it at the ripe old age of 58. Lastly, let us assume that she is taking oral contraception during the interval 40 year period without break to produce offspring (she is a Democrat after all).

This lands her at $37.50 month for her oral contraceptive needs. Given that the least expensive pills are $9, you would be paying more along the line of $4,320 for 40 years of contraceptive bliss.

How much do other forms of birth control cost?

Well, an IUD lasts 5 years, and if Julia doesn’t mind the abortifantastic aspects of its mechanism of action (and you know she doesn’t), one can imagine paying $1,200 cash pay at a reliable OB-GYN. Less if you prefer the butchers at Planned Parenthood who subsidize the cost with your Susan B. Komen charitable donation and tax dollars. Again, worst case scenario, Julia would be out $9,600 over 40 years. So, if Julia is into polyamory, she, her gal-pal and her man can be covered for the duration going that route.

Then there’s sterilization. Dr. J. will spot Julia the $37.50 to get her from age 18 to age 26 where by state law she can then undergo sterilization, and that will amount to $3,600 plus $2,500 for actually getting her tubes tied. Alternatively she could fork over $400-600 for her committed male partner to get snipped. Given that he’s dating Julia, he’s probably been already castrated, but still.

None of this gets into the fact that no one taking oral contraception should take it for 40 years straight. Julia would probably get a deep venous thrombosis, pulmonary embolus, malignancy or something else after such a chronic exposure to synthetic estrogens and progestins.

Dr. J. believes that birth control like all other health matters is a personal and private matter. However, once an individual demands that others pay for that product, or a related service, it becomes the payor’s business. This is how we got into the mess we are in with Medicare/medicaid and HMO’s. They want to know where their money is spent, and doctors and nurses sacrifice a significant number of man-hours documenting everything little thing to prove they did what they said they did in order to get paid. They have coders to help insure compliance, etc.

Dr. J. is amazed how far to the left sheeple have drifted in the last four years in the name of free stuff.
This has been a challenging concept for individuals to grasp as when Dr. J. has discussed the HHS mandate with employed individuals, including a fellow doctor who makes $300,000+ a year, they think that their employer should be on the hook for the pill even if they work for a Catholic Hospital. Their sex life is none of their employer’s business, yet the employer must subsidize it. The employee is far better off subsidizing it themselves and it being none of the employer’s business. Honestly, no Catholic school ever screened its kindergarten teachers for ethinyl estradiol metabolites in her urine. Nor will it ever. It just doesn’t want to pay for said compound.

By way of comparison, Dr. J.’s work-morning latte habit costs $36,000 over the same 40 year span.

Dr. J.