Pride At Work

Resolution

Help Virginia Working Families Who Need Health Care

End Narrow Reading & Intrusive Enforcement of Va. Health Care Guideline

Whereas the Northern Virginia Central Labor Council has played a leading role in pushing for and maintaining health care coverage for working families in and around Northern Virginia;

Whereas many workers in the D.C. metropolitan area, through their unions, continue to push for and win health care coverage of their domestic partners by their employers;

Whereas the insurance commissioner of Virginia has misconstrued a state guideline that family health care plans cover spouses and children as an absolute ceiling for such plans, rather than as floor, or baseline;

Whereas this hostile ruling that defines family in a narrow and discriminatory fashion has imposed a de facto prohibition on locally led efforts by both public and private entities to expand group plans, thus barring qualified partners from coverage;

Whereas this ruling is aggressively enforced by an anti-civil rights and anti-worker attorney general with scant oversight by an anti-worker General Assembly that has considered but as yet refused to provide needed review and remedy;

Whereas such enforcement stifles the better motives of some employers, violates the “conservative” principle of noninterference by the state in local and workplace policy-making, defies the purpose of government to advance the public welfare, and interferes with the collective bargaining process;

Therefore, the Northern Virginia Central Labor Council deplores this misinterpretation of Virginia guidelines on family health care coverage, urges its immediate reconsideration and revision, and encourages other area unions, labor bodies, and allies to work toward its revision so as to permit expanded access to health care.

Submitted by Washington-area Pride At Work, AFL-CIO, June 19, 2003