By Amy Griffin
For many women with Church-provided insurance, the story is painfully familiar: A woman is told by her doctor that because of a serious illness she needs birth control. Yet no matter the pain, suffering or stakes, Church insurance refuses to cover the necessary care.
“After years of suffering, I learned that I had uterine polyps,” wrote an anonymous woman on an Instagram petition. “When I woke up from surgery to remove them, the doctor said I had polyps ‘covering every surface of (my) uterus.'” To prevent further polyps and uterine cancer, the 48-year-old woman needs an IUD, which her insurance would not cover.
“My choices were (to) spend $1,300 on my doctor, get cancer, or go to Planned Parenthood,” she wrote. “Gotta love health insurance that doesn’t provide health care.”
The woman’s story is one of dozens recorded by the Instagram account @dmba_stories, which calls itself a “petition” of “hundreds of personal impact stories” submitted by women who have experienced “the pain caused by these exclusions”.
So what exactly is the problem?
For the thousands of women receiving health insurance from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there is a gaping hole in what is otherwise considered adequate coverage: a broad failure to cover the control of births. While exclusion from politics is far from new, it’s only in recent months that an organized effort on social media has emerged and started calling for change.
Deseret Mutual Benefit Administrators (DMBA) is a Church-established agency that provides health insurance to more than 16,000 Church employees, including BYU employees as well as all students enrolled in the University Health Care Plan. the university.
DMBA’s medical plans cover other fertility services, including artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization, but exclude from any coverage “family planning, including contraception, birth control devices and/or sterilization procedures unless the person covered meets current medical criteria for DMBA”.
However, the exact nature of these medical criteria is unclear.
The conditions that would qualify a person for birth control coverage are not found in the DMBA’s explanations of benefits or other documents. Multiple calls to DMBA and Magellan Health, the company it handles prescriptions with, found no representatives able to provide criteria that DMBA nurses use to determine who to accept prior authorizations for and who to deny.
In fact, Magellan said most contraceptives are covered and proved it by filing a test request for an oral contraceptive on behalf of someone on the call. This claim, despite contradicting DMBA policy, was approved – because DMBA never saw it.
This means that the DMBA, which processes prescriptions before sending them to Magellan, prevents most birth control prescriptions from reaching Magellan’s approval system. A DMBA representative said their agency’s nurses are “reviewing” requests for medical necessity on prior clearances from physicians to determine if conditions “meet guidelines,” but would not provide any information to the patient about the content of these. guidelines.
If the @dmba_stories account is any indication, many birth control requests to treat serious medical conditions at the doctor’s sincere request are nevertheless denied under DMBA’s “guidelines” without ever being forwarded to Magellan for approval.
People whose experiences have been posted on @dmba_stories claim that DMBA nurses and administrators – who never examined the patient themselves – refused treatment to patients with endometriosis, repeated ectopic pregnancies and dangerous miscarriages, severe postpartum depression, risk of cancer, and even a doctor’s insistence that a future pregnancy would result in death.
The Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, requires health insurance providers to pay for contraceptives. DMBA’s exclusion policy is legal in part because of a landmark 2014 Supreme Court case, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, in which the court ruled that under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, employers are not required to cover birth control if it contradicts the company’s religious values. .
In this case, Hobby Lobby and other employers felt that several contraceptives required by Obamacare “effectively facilitated abortion.” The court allowed Hobby Lobby and other employers in a similar position to “grandfather” their old medical plans, which excluded contraceptives, while the majority of employers still had to meet the federal contraceptive mandate. The decision was widely seen as a victory for religious freedom.
The DMBA is one such “excluded” program. Yet The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has no formal objection to birth control. In fact, the Church’s official position is that the decision to have a baby “is a private matter for husband and wife.”
After realizing that essential care is not available to them through regular means, many Church-employed women turn to Planned Parenthood.
For Sydney Mogotsi, a former employee of the Church’s humanitarian department, the decision not to provide birth control actually appears to be against Church policy.
“If we want to be pro-life, we have to support universal access to birth control,” Mogotsi said. “That’s really how you’re going to prevent unwanted pregnancies.” Mogotsi has considerable experience in the area of women’s reproductive health worldwide.
“Overwhelmingly, when women have universal access to birth control, everything gets better,” she said. “They are better educated, they have a longer lifespan.”
Rachel Fountain is a recent BYU graduate who receives health insurance from DMBA due to her parents’ positions as Church mission presidents.
She and Mogotsi agree that the problem probably stems from a leadership imbalance.
“In Church employment, we don’t see many women in leadership roles,” Mogotsi said. She expressed concern that the lack of diversity among decision-makers means that women’s issues are not treated as seriously as they should be. When she tried to raise the issue, however, she was criticized.
“I was told you know, I painted a bad picture of the Church,” Mogotsi said. “(That) if I continue to publicize this, they will not be able to recruit and retain women. And so I was kind of made to feel like the bad guy.
Mogotsi said she only felt comfortable speaking now as she left her position in the Church and headed to another workplace.
Fountain felt similarly ignored and misunderstood as a student under DMBA politics.
“I kinda feel like I’m being told, we don’t care about your upbringing, we don’t care about your job. You’re a baby-making machine,” Foutain said.
Fountain, a returned missionary who calls her family “the biggest Latter-day Saint family you can have,” becomes frustrated when she feels talking gets her dismissed as “anti-Church.” She wishes those who would send her back instead would see that “this daughter of God is suffering”.
Although she was a newlywed who needed contraceptives for family planning purposes, she especially sympathized with those who needed them for medical reasons. She compared these people to the “biblical woman with a blood problem for 12 years”, who many scholars believe suffered from a disease affecting her menstrual cycle, Fountain said she expects the Church steps in and tries to heal as Christ would.
“It’s a great example to me of Christ reaching out to women and challenging the societal norms of the time,” Fountain said. “And say, ‘I’m going to help you. And I don’t care what society says, you’re a daughter of God, and I love you, and let me heal you.
For Sydney Springer, a current BYU student, the exclusion affects how she feels about herself. Springer has what she sarcastically describes as “truly delightful health conditions”, which require birth control as treatment in order to “not be bedridden and miserable all your life”. Still, with the DMBA refusing to provide care, Springer felt disheartened.
“It’s hard to feel important,” Springer said. “Let your voice and your decisions matter when there are people making decisions for you about your own body.”
With a growing account following and dozens of unshared stories on the back burner, @dmba_stories is trying to bring the experiences of countless affected women to the public.
Springer hopes, but isn’t particularly optimistic, that someone is listening.
“Does this really reach the decision-makers? And if so, do they care? Springer said. “Probably not, in my opinion. Otherwise, I think we would see a change at this point.
For Fountain, recognition and commitment to change are essential.
“I hope someone will listen,” Fountain said. “It’s not like Christ, it has to change. And it’s okay to admit mistakes. It is the gospel of repentance.
