Dual coverage...a thing of the past?  More complicated issues on who can be covered....if a spouse is presently part of a plan from their spouse, companies are denying coverage with their insurance...do you drop the insurance coverage from the spouse to be covered by your employer or do you simply not participate?  Decisions continue to get more complicated as time goes on...BD 

It's a choice millions of couples would love to face - two largely subsidized health insurance plans to choose from. Spouses working for different employers that both offer health coverage have long been able to make that choice without penalty. They simply sign up for the one that works best for their family. But a growing number of big corporations are extracting a fee from employees who enjoy the luxury of choice. Ford, Microsoft, General Electric, Gannett and Pitney Bowes, among others, all impose surcharges for providing health insurance to spouses of employees - when the spouses are eligible for insurance at their own workplaces.

Last week, Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and The Courant, joined in, telling employees it would start the fee in January.  Surcharges can range from $600 a year to several thousand. Tribune plans to charge $900 - $75 a month.

But many workers and their advocates find the changes a bitter pill to swallow.  By 2006, 8 percent of large corporations offered some type of incentive to keep spouses off health plans, up from 7 percent in 2005, according to a Mercer survey with 3,000 respondents.

The spousal surcharge isn't an additional burden in all cases. Microsoft, for example, pays all health insurance costs for its employees, deducting nothing from their salaries and requiring no co-pays, said spokesman Lou Gellos. Microsoft employees whose spouses join Microsoft's plan then pay $900 per year.

A small number of employers won't let their own workers join company health plans if they are eligible to join a spouse's plan somewhere else.

Spouses, Smokers Earning Penalties -- Courant.com

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