In the first case filed under the Affordable Care Act's anti-discrimination provision, the National Women's Law Center is
suing a number of large employers for refusing to provide maternity care to children covered by employees.
According to the NWLC, the complaints were filed against a mix of private and public institutions, including Battelle Memorial Institute, Beacon Health System, Auburn University, Gonzaga University and the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education.
The suit alleges that each of these employers violated a provision of the healthcare law protecting individuals from sex discrimination by failing to provide comprehensive maternity coverage to female dependents of its employees; a gap that effectively treats pregnancy as a different class of care, and denies female dependents less comprehensive health coverage than their male counterparts.
The Affordable Care Act not only bars sex discrimination in federal health programs, like Medicare and Medicaid, it also
extends the ban to "any health program or activity that receives federal financial assistance, such as research grants or subsidies," which these institutions participate in. Now that adult children can be included on their parents' plans, this discrimination could affect many, many families.
So far, the lawsuits filed in this realm have been entirely discriminatory, and of course political: employers who don't want to cover a full range of women's health services, and particularly birth control. This is apparently the first case to expand health care to women under the law. Good.