RUSH: If you missed today’s Morning Update, you have to hear this. There’s a new crisis that’s emerged out there, and it’s threatening the education of millions of America’s college students, and basically it is this. The price of birth control, without warning, is skyrocketing out there — and students, of course, are bearing the brunt of this. ‘The cost of oral contraceptives,’ and I think back, and I’ve always said when I got older I was not going to be an old fogy, but sometimes I just cannot imagine in the fifties and sixties, when I was in my teenaged years even hearing a story (laughing) about this: A crisis on campus has nothing do with education. No, it’s rising contraceptive prices, and of course with students bearing the brunt. Now, you might say, ‘Students? Well, why aren’t the parents bearing the brunt of this?’ I’ll explain that if you’ll be patient. ‘The cost of oral contraceptives,’ and for those of you in Rio Linda, that means birth control pills, ‘has doubled. Sometimes it’s tripled in some cases at student health centers,’ and of course, this has health officials concerned that cheapskate students are going to start using less preferred methods or stop using birth control altogether.
What they’re really afraid of is the students will stop having sex, because if they stop having sex then you can’t push condoms and birth control and a number of other things, plus you can’t sell as many cigarettes. So this guy at Indiana University, Hugh Jessup, he’s the executive director of the health center there, is among The Concerned. He said, ‘It’s a tremendous problem for our students because not every student has a platinum card.’ He says here that women are paying $22 a month for birth control that only cost $10 a few months ago. He says, ‘Some of our students have two jobs, and they have children.’ Some of the students have children? How can that happen? Stop and think for a moment. How can this be? How can the students have children if they’re able to afford all this birth control? Now, if you look at the numbers here, no comfort is provided: ‘39% of undergraduate women who use oral contraceptives, according to an estimate by the American College Health Association, is expected now to fall because of these price increases.’ Now, in case you wonder why the price has gone up, the answer is Congress. The short version is that because of all the attacks on Big Pharmaceuticals that have been worked into budget deficit packages and so forth, legislation, the end result here is that they eliminated discounts that filtered down to colleges. There’s no fix for this, I referenced this at the top, because female students can’t go ask their parents for birth control money because we just learned they are the parents! If they don’t have enough money now, how can they ask themselves for more money? They’re the parents on our college campi. This is a crisis. This could bring American higher education to its knees in more ways than one.