Medical Insurance Benefits and Unmarried Partners

There has been a lot in the News lately about Civil Unions and Domestic Partnerships and you may be wondering just how are such arrangements recognized, if at all, when it comes to health insurance benefits?

It may surprise you to learn that while the convention is when companies provide affordable group health benefits to an employee they also provide those medical benefits to a married spouse, there is no law that states they have to. In fact currently there is no Federal Law that states that a company has to provide Health Insurance benefits to anyone. The wording of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) states: An employer is not required to offer health insurance to any employees, spouses, or domestic partners. Many companies interpret “domestic partners” as same-sex marriages, but the term actually applies to unmarried opposite sex couples living together, and common-law marriages.

As you might imagine the laws do vary from state to state. In Massachusetts, where they recently did pass such legislature requiring that companies of certain sizes provide affordable healthcare benefits to their employees or face penalties, those requirements still do not extend to spouses of any kind or domestic partners. Yet some companies there do extend health benefits to “domestic partners” and spouses in same sex marriages which are legal in Massachusetts. However since COBRA is Federal program, and the Federal Government does not recognize same sex marriages, COBRA benefits may not apply to a same sex spouse if their partner loses their job.

So it is a complicated issue. But still many well known and large scale employers are extending health insurance and other benefits to domestic partners. Insurance and Human Resource experts agree that they expect this development to continue. It is anticipated that more small to medium sized companies will start to follow the lead of large employers that have introduced domestic partner health benefit plans.

Many States and even municipalities within states are passing legislature recognizing the overall rights of domestic partners. In California for example, San Francisco and Los Angeles have demanded that any employer that has a municipal contract extend the same benefits they do to married couples to same sex domestic partners, or risk losing that contract. Seattle has similar legislation on the books. Vermont was one of the first states to pass a Civil Union Law that grants same sex couples almost all of the same rights as married couples. Under the Vermont Law many Spousal Benefits including certain health benefits, child support and issues involving family leave, visitation rights, and child custody rights, all apply the same to civil unions as to marriages.

To further confuse the issue the definition of Domestic Partner is not carved in stone and just as it varies from state to state it varies from employer to employer. Some consider “Domestic Partner” to be same sex couples, opposite sex couples cohabitating, and common law marriages, and extend health insurance benefits to all of these arrangements. Other employers will only consider same sex couples “Domestic Partners” when it comes to offering affordable medical coverage, because they feel that unmarried opposite sex couples have the option of getting married, where most same sex couples in most states still do not have that option.