If a company pays 100% of the health insurance for:
the employee, employee+spouse, employee+child, and employee + family and offers that coverage universally, can they exclude certain individuals from receiving the benefits?
ex. Bob chooses employee+family coverage at $0 cost. Bob's wife is a stay at home mom.
Sally chooses employee+family coverage at $0 cost. However, Sally's husband could get insurance through his employer, although said employer doesn't pay 100% of the premium like Sally's company. Sally is told that the company will not pay for medical benefits for her husband b/c he is eligible for insurance elsewhere.
Anyone deal with this? Seems like discrimination to me. Basically in a nut shell, is that all costs will be covered except those spouses who are eligible for insurance somewhere else. Can they exclude individuals like this? Is it true that under the new healthcare reform act, if employers offer coverage to a certain class, don't they have to offer it to all employees in the class equally?
Re: HR or healthcare question, maybe legal question too?
DD- 9
DS-6
c/p- April 2016
missed m/c- 6w5d; discovered 8w2d- September 2016
Yes, they can do that.
Is it discrimination - sure. But discrimination isn't illegal.
Discrimination is only illegal if it is based on certain characteristics, like age, race, color, sex, religion, national origin. So unless they are saying "Only white people get all premiums paid" or something like that - it's ok.
Now - if it were to turn out that only the WOMEN in the company had their spouses excluded, because all the dudes there have SAH wives, then despite their rule not being illegally discriminatory, the IMPACT has affected one protected class of employees unevenly. Then that would change things. But that's the only way I can think of that what they are doing would be a legal issue.
DMoney will be a kickass big sister
Doesn't change things. Perfectly legal for them to do so. It might be unfair, but it's perfectly legal.
And, if they have less than 15 employees, even the illegal discrimination stuff would be ok too.
DMoney will be a kickass big sister
I'm not sure. I'm guessing that they would have you sign something and if it proves to be false, the entire family can lose coverage for fraud.