Lady Business: My birth-control reporting sees some White House results

President Biden's executive order could be a big step in solving an infuriating health-insurance impasse for American women.

Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 148th issue, published July 9, 2023.

Some Good News

A few months ago, Fortune published a reporting project I’m really proud of, about a complicated but infuriating health care crisis. Now the White House is taking action on that crisis:

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, [by issuing] 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.)

This was incredibly gratifying on a personal level, because I really cared about and put a ton of effort into my investigation; because I’m really happy with how the article turned out; and because it hasn’t always seemed like the most marketable project, you know? (Trying to get “women’s health” plus “insurance reimbursement barriers” into a clicky business headline was … a challenge.)

But sometimes exposes about systemic problems are hard to market! Birth control is often dismissed as a problem that’s already been abundantly solved–yet almost half of all U.S. pregnancies are still unplanned. Clearly, something (or many things) hasn’t been working, systemically.

There are still several things that need to happen before this executive order leads to actual change: While Biden is basically telling federal agencies to prioritize this, his order didn’t include a specific deadline. But it’s a big step, and it could actually make a difference to millions of American women–especially in this post-Roe era. 

Lady Bits

–"Companies like CVS and UnitedHealth are now some of the world’s biggest businesses. Is that healthy for the rest of us?" I interviewed CVS CEO Karen Lynch for Fortune’s current cover story, co-reported with my colleague Erika Fry, about the immense business growth of for-profit health care providers and whether what’s good for their investors is also good for America. (Spoiler: Many are skeptical!)

–While I was on vacation last month, I found out that my reporting last year on overpaid CEOs won an Excellence in Financial Journalism award for Enterprise Reporting. (Speaking of results: A year after Fortune published our package on the Most Overpaid CEOs in America, co-reported with my colleagues Scott DeCarlo and Geoff Colvin, six of the top 10 “overpaid” CEOs on our list have since lost or left their jobs.)

–"As a journalist who has been told for decades that my empathy for the female candidates I often cover is probably overemotional and built too strongly on personal identification, let me just tell you that you should never stand between a white male political journalist over the age of 40 and his feelings about the Kennedys." Beyond that line, which resonated for obvious reasons, Rebecca Traister’s New York cover story about RFK, Jr. is a master class in how to profile someone both powerful and dangerous without further legitimizing them.

–Whatever happened to Ted Lasso? I mean this especially in a meta sense, not (only) about the show’s writing. Sure, I could write a full newsletter and a half about how the show’s third (and final?) season undermined so much of what I loved about its first season. But a month or so post-finale, it’s also striking how much the show seems to have just … vanished from the pop-culture conversation.

–However, TV shows I am enjoying this summer include Silo (which drags a little after pulling off a terrifically tense thriller in its third episode, but which very much sticks the landing); and the second season of The Bear (especially everything involving Richie's character arc, but minus the atrocious Manic Pixie Dream Girlfriend).

Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com