May 24, 2019
Carson City, NV – Today, Nevada Attorney General Aaron D. Ford moved to intervene in a Texas lawsuit in order to defend the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) requirement that employer-provided health insurance include birth control coverage. The Texas suit is a class action lawsuit that seeks to roll back this ACA requirement. Because the Trump Administration refused to defend the ACA’s preventive care provisions in the suit, Nevada was left with no choice but to intervene and protect Nevada women’s access to care and Nevada’s state law that prevents employers from dictating what health care their employees can and cannot receive.
“Nearly 400,000 Nevada women who receive private insurance coverage could be affected by this case,” said AG Ford. “The State of Nevada has stepped up before to defend Nevada’s interests before the courts on this issue. We now step in again to make sure our interests in preventive care are represented. I’m proud to lead this effort to protect women’s access to health care.”
This is a continuation of previous Nevada efforts to protect existing ACA contraceptive provisions. In early 2019, Nevada filed two friend-of-the-court briefs asking the federal courts to issue a nationwide preliminary injunction stopping the federal government from implementing new regulations that would eviscerate the ACA’s current preventive care requirements. After the federal district court issued an injunction, Nevada filed another friend-of-the-court brief asking the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to maintain the injunction nationwide.
Since the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010, most employers who provide health insurance coverage to their employees have been required to include coverage for contraception, at no cost to the employee. As a result of this Act, more than 55 million women in the United States have access to a range of Federal Drug Administration-approved methods of birth control with no out-of-pocket costs.
The filed motion is attached.
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