Published July 2001

Judge’s ruling endangers affordable health-care coverage

By Carolyn Logue
Guest Editorial

The National Federation of Independent Business, the largest small-business group in Washington state, disagrees with a Seattle federal district judge’s mid-June ruling on contraceptive insurance coverage.

The Seattle court’s ruling — that company health plans that do not contain contraceptive prescriptions but do contain prescriptions for other medical conditions are sexually discriminatory — completely misses the mark.

The issue is not whether an employee with a particular medical condition is being discriminated against, but whether forcing companies to add to their health plans every single prescription and treatment to every known medical malady boosts the costs of premiums so high that it forces businesses to drop health coverage completely.

And, with insurance premium increases averaging 20 to 50 percent for small businesses, even a small increase will mean no coverage for some employees — that is not fair to those employees who may not need contraceptive coverage.

The skyrocketing cost of providing health care for workers is particularly pronounced in Washington state. For the past 15 years, the 17,000 NFIB/Washington members have listed the cost of providing health care to their employees as one of their two biggest problems in remaining solvent.

The Washington state Legislature, Congress, the courts and the Insurance Commissioner should all be far more concerned about how to make health insurance MORE affordable for ALL people. They should not be supporting any additional costs.

Small business provides more than six of every 10 working Washingtonians with a paycheck. But more and more companies have been dropping health-care coverage for their workers entirely, faced as they have been with double-digit increases in health-care premiums each of the past three years.

Washington state exacerbated this national problem by passing a health-care law in 1993 that drove insurers out of the state, a situation that has not yet been fully corrected.

What the judge did last month was not affirm the health-care rights of a plaintiff but almost ensure that thousands more working Washingtonians will soon be without health-care coverage completely. This is a sad, but classic, case of the road to hell being paved with well-meaning intentions.

Carolyn Logue is the Washington state Director for the National Federation of Independent Business, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization. For more information on NFIB, visit the group’s Web site, www.nfib.com.

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