Let's say you are a Benefits Manager at a large company or just a HR type wearing the benefits hat at a smaller employer.  You get to the question on the Rx side - should I cover birth control pills? - and the answer is simple.  A ounce of prevention and a $10 generic prescription makes sense from an employee relations standpoint, correct?

Apparently, the scenario isn't as clear as I thought it was.  A federal appellate panel in St. Louis ruled recently that The Union Pacific Railroad Company did not discriminate against its female employees by excluding birth-control pills from its health insurance coverage.  From a NYT article covering the decision: 

“Union Pacific’s health plans do not cover any contraception used by women such as birth control, sponges, diaphragms, intrauterine devices or tubal ligations or any contraception used by men such as condoms and vasectomies,” the opinion said. “Therefore, the coverage provided to women is not less favorable than that provided to men.”

Thursday’s ruling grew out of several sex-discrimination lawsuits by female Union Pacific employees who used prescription contraception, including two railroad engineers, Brandi Standridge of Idaho and Kenya Phillips of Missouri. The suits were consolidated into a class-action suit on behalf of all the railroad’s females employees who used prescription contraception without insurance reimbursement.

In July 2005, a federal district court in Nebraska ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered Union Pacific to cover all prescription contraception approved by the Food and Drug Administration."

As luck would have it, Union Pacific seems to have found its common sense meter: 

“We’re not going to take it away,” the spokesman, Mark Davis, said. The ruling covers all of the railroad’s unionized female employees. 

In case you were wondering if the plan was restrictive across the board, prescriptions are available under the same plan, same group for Rogaine, for men’s baldness, and Viagra, for impotence, but not birth control pills until UP was forced by court order..

Yikes!  That is old school to the hilt.  If any of you were planning to launch that benefits consultancy you have been dreaming of, UP looks to be a valid target....