Health insurers have long ignored a federal law to cover birth control. Biden’s new executive order could force them to comply

It’s maddeningly, unreasonably difficult for women to get access to the right birth control, as I reported in this April investigation for Fortune. One of the most infuriating problems is that insurance companies are widely ignoring federal law. The Affordable Care Act requires private insurers to fully cover any contraception that a woman’s doctor deems medically necessary—but in practice, my investigation found, many insurance companies regularly refuse to cover some contraceptives. As a result, many women are unable to afford the birth control they want (and their medical providers prescribe), while the companies that develop and sell new kinds of contraceptives have struggled to stay in business.  

Now President Joe Biden is taking action to address the very problems Fortune’s investigation highlighted. On Friday, Biden issued a wide-ranging executive order on contraception. The president specifically ordered federal agencies “to consider new guidance to ensure that private health insurance” covers all contraceptives.

(And we’re going to take a little bit of credit here: In announcing the executive order, White House advisers acknowledged they were “tracking some of the reports out there about [insurers’] failure to comply” with the Affordable Care Act, Stat News reported on Friday.)

Biden’s executive order did not discuss a specific deadline for federal agencies to take more action, and a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services declined to provide more specifics on timing. But many of my sources, including reproductive-health advocates and contraceptive industry executives, say the president’s mandate could finally break through this years-long logjam.

“I’m really hopeful,” Mara Gandal-Powers, director of birth control access and senior counsel for the National Women’s Law Center, told me. “It certainly indicates that this is really high priority for the president—and I do think that the agencies listen when these kinds of things come out.”

Read my investigation here, and my full story about President Biden’s executive order here.

Maria Aspan
maria.aspan@fortune.com
@mariaaspan

The Broadsheet is Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Kinsey Crowley. Subscribe here.

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PARTING WORDS

“We have no way to avoid failures. But ‘intelligent failures'—I want to argue—this is where the future of work lies. They bring valuable new knowledge.”

—Harvard Business School professor and author Amy Edmondson