Katherine O’Reilly, a certified nurse midwife in her 30s, works full time at the Mesa County Health Department’s clinic in Grand Junction, Colo., and she’s eager to show off the clinic’s stash of one of the most effective forms of birth control. First, though, she has to get out her electronic badge to unlock a heavy wood door with a paper sign, “PLEASE KEEP DOOR CLOSED AT ALL TIMES!!!” She surveys shelves packed with boxes of gloves and gauze, then walks over to an unmarked metal cabinet. She opens it and bends down to look at the bottom shelves. “There they are!” she says, as if they’d been hiding from her.
She points to a stack of long, slim packages the size of a box of chocolates. Inside each is an intrauterine device and a tall, skinny straw that clinicians use to insert the flexible, T-shaped pieces of plastic into a uterus, where it can prevent pregnancy for as long as 10 years. “When I see patients, my goal is to be able to initiate contraception today,” she says. That means having IUDs in stock is essential.
It’s also expensive. IUDs can retail for more than $800 each, so a public health clinic such as Mesa County’s that attends to women with little or no medical insurance treats the devices almost like a controlled substance. The clinic spends $774,000 a year to serve a rural county of some 150,000. It can stock the pricey devices thanks in part to a statewide initiative to reduce unplanned pregnancies. The $24 million for the six-year effort came from an anonymous donor.
That funding ended in July. Luckily, O’Reilly says, there’s now a lower-cost alternative. This summer, the clinic got its first shipment of an IUD named Liletta that hit the market in April. Liletta is manufactured and sold by Allergan but was developed by a nonprofit, Medicines360, whose entire seed funding –Â $74 million –Â also came from an anonymous donor. “Our clinic can get Lilettas for $50,” O’Reilly says. “With our population, once we get that going, Liletta will be the one most women choose.”
A decade ago, almost no one in the U.S. had IUDs because of the device’s awful history and lingering reputation. By 2013, however, as women learned about superior, safer designs, IUDs had become the method of choice (PDF) for more than 10 percent of women using contraceptives, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among women age 25 to 34, they’re as popular as condoms, and they’re far more effective. The U.S. contraceptive market, including pills and IUDs, totaled more than $6 billion in 2013, according to Transparency Market Research.
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A multiyear study of almost 10,000 women in St. Louis found that when providers offered women all forms of contraception for free, 75 percent chose IUDs and hormonal implants. The study’s been cited by several medical groups, including the CDC as part of its recommendation to doctors to encourage IUD use. This study received close to $20 million, also from an anonymous donor.
Almost all women – and therefore men – use a form of birth control at some point in their lives, yet contraception is so politically and legally radioactive that legislators and pharmaceutical companies avoid funding it. So it’s no coincidence that the money behind the Colorado initiative, the St. Louis study and Liletta all came from an unnamed philanthropic source – they all were from the same discreet foundation. Very few people will discuss The Anonymous Donor on the record, but tax filings, medical journal disclosures, and an archived interview with a foundation official show the funds come from Warren Buffett (Trades, Portfolio), the chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A, Financial)(BRK.B, Financial), and his family.
continue reading: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-30/warren-buffett-s-family-secretly-funded-a-birth-control-revolution
