By Jonathan Allen, CQ Staff

The cost of birth control would drop sharply on college campuses and at clinics catering to low-income women under a measure Rep. Joseph Crowley is looking to attach to another bill before the end of the year.

The New York Democrat said Wednesday that he is searching for a suitable vehicle for his bill (HR 4054) which would reverse a portion of last year’s Deficit Reduction Act that eliminated an incentive for drug companies to sell reduced-price birth control pills to college and low-cost community health clinics.

The skyrocketing cost of birth control – from as little as $3 for a monthly package of contraceptives to as much as $50 — has become a major issue on college campuses around the country.

“It’s kind of an emergency,” Crowley said. “We’re trying to find a vehicle by which we could get it through.”

The most obvious choice would be a Medicare bill centered on a “fix” of reimbursement rates for doctors. Medicare reimbursements for physicians are set to drop by 10 percent Jan. 1 unless Congress stops the scheduled cut. But it is not clear that lawmakers will take action on a Medicare package before Congress adjourns for the year.

Crowley and Rep. Tim Ryan , D-Ohio, were thwarted in attempt earlier this year to add the language to a supplemental war-spending bill when other lawmakers balked at the idea of mixing the two issues. Their effort is supported by Planned Parenthood, the National Organization for Women and many collegiate editorial writers.

“Without this legislation, many more college students will have unwanted pregnancies because they cannot obtain access to the most effective, and therefore more expensive, forms of control,” NOW president Kim Gandy said last March.

But some Republicans say the pill is poison.

“When they tried to slip this in a bill earlier this year, we called it the ‘Planned Parenthood discount drug earmark,’” said a Republican congressional aide. “It will be even less popular now.”

Rep. Deborah Pryce , R-Ohio, a GOP moderate said, “The politics would be a very smart move for the Democrats,” noting that it would unify their caucus.

Proponents say low-income women and college students were inadvertently swept up in the 2006 reconciliation law’s language stripping away federal measures intended to help stabilize drug prices. Roughly 400 college, community and Planned Parenthood clinics lost birth-control discounts under the law.

Crowley’s bill, which has 140 cosponsors, would add university health centers and certain clinics that do not receive federal funding to a list of entities eligible for “nominal” pricing under the Public Health Service Act.