Writing at Forbes, Benn Steil also finds the lack of a copay in ObamaCare's contraceptive mandate suspicious:
oral contraceptives are singled out, among thousands of drugs, for special treatment through the ban on co-pay requirements. Women will continue to bear co-pays for antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals whose use bears a far more imminent relationship with their health...banning co-pays clearly goes well beyond making them affordable.
The Department of Health and Human Services and Obama Press Secretary Jay Carney each insisted that such a ban was necessary to ensure "access," but this is playing fast and loose with language. A $10 co-pay for penicillin does not deny women "access" to it; if they're on an employer-sponsored health plan, they can almost surely afford it, and can acquire it at any pharmacy. If this had truly been about ensuring "access" to effective birth control for the poor, expanding free-condom programs would have done the trick. But the policy's supporters know that the politics of federally funding condom distribution are much worse than just declaring pills "free." This is about implementing social policy – stimulating wider use of birth control pills – through health insurance regulation.
More:
In fundamentally changing the economics of birth control, the Administration is also discouraging innovation in the technology used to deliver it. What business sense is there now in drug manufacturers developing cheaper pills, or male versions of them?
All of this is the sort of thing that might concern even those of us who are not Catholic and don't have religious grounds for objecting to the ObamaCare free birth-control-pill mandate.