Fight for contraceptive benefits continues.

Byline: Jeff Wright The Register-Guard

CORRECTION (ran 3/6/03): Lane County government has offered contraceptive benefits to its employees since last August. Because of incorrect information supplied by the county, a story on page A1Tuesday misstated the benefits.

Women's health advocates wrapped up one successful legal challenge and initiated another Tuesday in the campaign to add oral contraception to employer-paid health benefits throughout the Northwest.

The court cases come as a growing number of employers - the city of Eugene among the most recent - provide the benefit. The state Legislature, meanwhile, is considering a bill that would prohibit insurers from excluding or reducing health coverage on the basis of gender.

The latest legal salvo came in U.S. District Court in Portland, where three women who work for the Union Pacific Railroad Co. filed a class action lawsuit, alleging that the company discriminates by providing a range of preventive health benefits - including Viagra and other impotence drugs - but no contraceptive care.

The suit, backed by Planned Parenthood, alleges that Union Pacific's action violates Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employers with 15 or more workers from making decisions based on gender or pregnancy.

"This is a very basic health care need that women need for well over two decades of their lives," said Roberta Riley, a Planned Parenthood lawyer in Seattle.

"Union Pacific benefits are very generous for every other conceivable condition imaginable."

The lawsuit was filed on the same day that a federal court in Seattle approved a class action settlement against Bartell Drug Co. The Seattle-based drug store chain agreed to cover all contraception co-payments for affected Bartell employees through 2006, and pay $100 to each former Bartell employee who was party to the suit.

Riley said the suit's lead plaintiff was a Bartell pharmacist "who got tired of telling women, `I'm sorry, your pills aren't covered.' '

The campaign for "contraceptive parity" got a push in 2000 when the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued a decision that employers can't exclude coverage for contraceptive drugs if they cover other prescription drugs.

Last year, 78 percent of insured workers at businesses and governments across the country had coverage for oral contraceptives, compared with only 64 percent in 2001, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which conducts an annual employer health benefits survey.

Eugene just added benefit

But some employers need a nudge - and a few in Eugene are getting it with help from the local Planned Parenthood office. In the past year, the office has asked about 500 women to fill out a form urging their employer to provide such coverage, spokeswoman Kitty Piercy said.

Only about 30 of the women have done so, but it's resulted in expanded coverage by about 10 employers, Piercy said. Many women decline out of concerns about job security in a poor economy, she said.

Many employers are receptive, she said, when it's pointed out that the benefit probably costs them less than additional pregnancy leaves.

One local employer, the city of Eugene, got the message after worker Michelle Mattern filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last fall. Until January, union-covered city employees had insurance benefits for IUDs and Norplant incisions, but not for oral contraceptives.

Mattern, an administrative assistant in the city prosecutor's office, said she loves her job, but was shocked to learn that the city - unlike her previous private and public employers in Portland - didn't provide coverage for oral contraception.

Her out-of-pocket costs without coverage would be about $48 a month - not an incidental expense, she said, considering her efforts to support a fiance in law school.

"I'm 30 and he's 33 and we're not ready to have kids," she said. "To me, it seemed absurd not to offer the benefit, especially in Eugene, which I thought was a progressive town. I was just dumbfounded."

Myrnie Daut, the city's risk and benefits manager, said the city planned to offer the benefit to union employees in the next bargaining sessions in 2004, but put the benefit on a fast track after Mattern's complaint. Union bargainers never sought the coverage in past negotiations, she said.

The cost to the city of providing the extra benefit will be about $44,000 annually, or less than 0.4 percent of the roughly $11 million paid out in employee health benefits each year, Daut said.

Lawmakers consider bill

Lane County doesn't provide contraceptive benefits to its employees, while the city of Springfield has done so since 1997. Springfield acted when its insurance carrier at the time added the benefit unasked, city benefits analyst Beth Murray said.

None of the three metro governments provides benefit coverage for Viagra or other impotence drugs.

John Powell, a lobbyist for Regence Blue Cross of Oregon, said insurance providers are philosophically opposed to mandated benefits because it can make insurance too expensive. Nonetheless, most insurers now routinely offer contraceptive coverage - unless an employer asks that it be removed, he said.

In Salem, the state Department of Consumer and Business Services has submitted Senate Bill 236, which would require insurers to cover prescription contraceptives to the same extent as other prescriptions.

The bill is before the Senate Health Policy Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Bill Morrisette, D-Springfield, and includes Sen. Vicki Walker, D-Eugene.

Twenty states already have such legislation, and Oregon - which has rejected the idea in five previous sessions - is among at least 13 others considering it now. State laws, however, don't apply to the millions of people who work for large, self-insured corporations.

Railroad responds to lawsuit

That includes Union Pacific, which contends that its health benefits are both generous and nondiscriminatory.

The railroad's benefits focus on medically necessary prescriptions, "and we feel contraceptives don't fall into that area, much like cosmetic surgery, weight loss prescriptions, elective surgery and fertility treatment," said Kathryn Blackwell, company spokeswoman in Omaha, Neb.

The railroad pays for impotence drugs, Blackwell said, "because it's considered a medical condition." Also, impotence drugs can be prescribed to both men and women, she said.

Blackwell said Union Pacific requires no employee co-payments and contributes $1,000 per month per employee in health benefits. The three female employees who brought Tuesday's suit, a clerk, conductor and engineer, work in jobs with average annual salaries ranging between $50,000 and $73,000, she said.

Riley, the women's attorney, said the three plaintiffs and other women "face real financial hardship" when trying to cover the full cost of oral contraceptives. To liken contraceptive services to cosmetic surgery, she said, "is an insult to women."

The lead plaintiff, Jackie Fitzgerald of La Grande, is an Air Force and gulf war veteran who has worked as a Union Pacific trainman since 1998.

She said in a prepared statement that she spends $39 a month for birth control pills while "my male co-workers are contributing to their retirement funds."

The other two lead plaintiffs live and work in Washington and Idaho.