June 13, 2017
The Pill Club, a service that provides at-your-door delivery of women's birth control products, is launching in Pennsylvania this month. Right now, the service, which prescribes out of Stanford University, is available in 10 other states.
The Pill Box is launching in Pennsylvania. The service offers deliverable birth control products to users with or without a prescription or insurance.
The service calls itself “Birchbox for Birth Control,” referring to the beauty product delivery service that has grown in popularity among women (and men) since its inception in 2010. Like Birchbox, The Pill Club mails packages to customers tailored to their specifications. Instead of perfume and mascara, though, these packages include birth control pills, rings or patches, and you can also get some chocolate and other free samples in there to sweeten the deal.
The service can work for users with or without health insurance, and a prescription isn’t required, either. For prescription holders, you can easily transfer the prescription to the service through the website; from there on out, The Pill Club will deal with copays and insurance.
If you’re without a current prescription, you can answer a few questions online about your health and get a prescription through the service without having to trek over to the gynecologist. If you’re without an insurer, you can still get a prescription, but expect to pay the non-insurance price.
For users with insurance, the copay is typically little to nothing. The delivery, too, is free.
In light of the current nebulous future of health insurance in the U.S., especially for Affordable Care Act holders, The Pill Club hopes to maintain affordable contraceptive prices despite what the future holds.
“Our own patients were [asking], especially after the election, ‘What’s going to happen to my coverage?'” Nick Chang, CEO of The Pill Club, told BuzzFeed in January. “We have only so much we can control in terms of what Trump and Pence and Price do. But one of the ways we can help patients right now and prepare them for anything that happens down the line is to give them protection and backup options.”
Though there are several other birth control delivery services that have been growing traction since the election, The Pill Club is one of the few available in Pennsylvania. Another that delivers to the state is Nurx, which also delivers PrEP and works similarly to The Pill Club. One differentiator is that The Pill Club, however, actually owns the birth control it prescribes and has direct access to the medication supply.
