Texas Employers Not Required To Cover HIV Drugs
September 8, 2022A judge in Texas has stated that employers should not have to cover PrEP medication, if it violates the company’s religious beliefs.
The ruling concluded that providing the drugs makes company owners “complicit in facilitating homosexual behavior.” US district judge Reed O’Connor made the judgement on September 7, according to Gay Times.
He found in favor of Braidwood Management, a Christian-owned company that argued it was not required to cover the cost of the PrEP drugs Truvada and Descovy.
Legal experts, such as Chris Geidner, noted that O’Connor has a history of “anti-LGBTQ rulings, both as to marriage and Title IX’s sex discrimination ban,” he explained in a Twitter thread following the ruling.
Many Americans take the drugs to prevent HIV transmission. The medication is made available through company health insurance plans, per the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
The lawsuit was filed by the state’s former solicitor general, Jonathan Mitchell, on behalf of Braidwood Management. Mitchell is known to be very conservative and designed Texas’s intensely restrictive abortion laws. Against them was the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Judge O’Connor stated that the ACA violated the religious beliefs of Braidwood Management “by making them complicit in facilitating homosexual behavior, drug use, and sexual activity outside of marriage between one man and woman.”
In a 2018 ruling, O’Connor stated the ACA was unconstitutional. This was overruled by the supreme court and upheld the ACA in 2021.
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