Posted on 11/25/2012 4:02:33 PM PST by Morgana
SAN FRANCISCO — Like a lot of newlyweds, Karen Golinski was eager to enjoy the financial fruits of marriage. Within weeks of her wedding, she applied to add her spouse to her employer-sponsored health care plan, a move that would save the couple thousands of dollars a year.
Her ordinarily routine request still is being debated more than four years later, and by the likes of former attorneys general, a slew of senators, the Obama administration and possibly this week, the U.S. Supreme Court. Because Golinski is married to another woman and works for the U.S. government, her claim for benefits has morphed into a multi-layered legal challenge to a 1996 law that prohibits the federal government from recognizing unions like hers.
The high court has scheduled a closed-door conference for Friday to review Golinski’s case and four others that also seek to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act overwhelmingly approved by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
partially correct
The real issue is going to be access to the social security for spouses
this blombs an even bigger hole in the budget than can be imagined.
No one is talking about this.
I’m kind of surprised that DOMA actually forbids the federal government from allowing any same-sex medical benefits.
Most private companies have those now, not for “gay marriage”, but for any same-sex partners who will claim they have a committed relationship.
Even in states like Virginia, which prohibit state recognition of gay marriage or civil unions, employers offer same-sex partner health benefits.
BINGO!!!!!!
The military system is unique because they are stationed all over the world. It's not much of an issue stateside. If you are stationed overseas and you are not covered by the military them it becomes expensive to send the kids to school or get medical care.
It would be impossible to have your spouse accompany you. The spouse would have to apply for visas etc on their own.
It’s an interesting problem, which exists because we have employers provide health care, instead of having people buy their own health care.
It’s a complicated issue. Prior to Obamacare, a private company could decide whether it was valuable to them to provide insurance for their workers, and also decide if it was valuable to provide insurance for the families of their workers.
It’s odd, because insurance is a benefit, which makes it part of your pay, and most large employers essentially give married couples higher pay for the same job, and couples with kids even HIGHER pay for the same job, through the coverage for medical insurance.
In my company, we pay more if we have a spouse, or kids, but it isn’t nearly enough more to cover the full costs — so I essentially get more money than the single guy sitting next to me. My company decides for some reason that this is a value to them, so they provide it, as part of their worker retention strategy.
Maybe they value married workers more than single workers. It certainly doesn’t seem “fair”. If you didn’t provide health insurance at all, I doubt a company would give you a raise for having a kid.
We don’t give people raises to help pay for spouse or child coverage on their car insurance.
Of course, we don’t force companies to cover car insurance either. I’m sure if the government was involved, we’d soon have such things.
Most of our social arguments could be dismissed if we simply got government out of the business of providing social services to begin with. I don’t really care if a private company pays their people more or less, I just care if the product they sell is worth the cost.
But because government sticks their nose into things, I have to care.
You mean you make less money than the single guy because their health insurance costs are less.
If you look at it from the insurance companies perspective the family unit will have more claims than the single person. This justifies them charging more for the family policies.
Insurance is not based on “fairness”, it’s based on loss tables and statistics. Insurance companies are in business to make a profit. Their rates are based on that not on fairness. The average person is clueless to this fact.
Insurance WAS based on pooled risk and they were very good with their statistical formulas for determining the appropriate costs for each individual that wanted to purchase a plan.
They are now just evil and deserve to be demonized because they were able to offer a method of pooling risk for voluntary participants and still make a profit! Now we are all “entitled” to their product for FREE. They should just give it to us and if they don’t, then we can burn them at the stake!
No, what I meant was what I said, that I make MORE money than the single guy doing exactly the same work.
My company provides health insurance, and I pay only a portion of the costs, let's say "20%" for the sake of discussion.
Because I have a wife and kids, my company provides insurance for all of them. My cost for that insurance is twice what my insurance alone would cost (adding kids doesn't raise the price much at all).
Let's assume again for the discussion that I pay $80 a week for insurance, and the single guy pays $40. Since my company covers 80% of the insurance cost, they are paying $320 for my insurance each week, and $160 for the single guy.
So, I get a benefit worth $160 more per week than my single co-worker. If my company simply paid us both the cost of insurance, and let us both buy it ourselve, I would be getting $160 more each week in my paycheck than the single guy.
Now, you are quite correct that my COSTS are also higher, because I have a family. But that has nothing to do with how much money I MAKE. And my point is exactly what you said, except you got it backwards -- in some large sense, my company providing me insurance seems to be based on "fairness", not loss tables or actual costs. I get more subsidy because I have higher costs because I have a family -- not because I contribute more to the profit of the company than the single guy.
Further, my company also largely covers the difference in health care costs related to aging. Not entirely, since my payments are based on a percentage of my income, which means that if I make more money as I get older, I'll also pay somewhat more. But since I won't make twice what a younger person with my same duties makes, and I'll likely cost 3 times as much for insurance as a new hire, I'm essentially getting a subsidized health insurance plan, and the new hire is likely paying MORE than their health insurance is worth.
My company allows them to opt out, but probably not starting next year. And even so, they only saved their own subsidized contribution (20%), not the entire 100%, and while they are overpaying, the "20%" they pay probably covers 80% of their real costs, while the "20%" I pay probably only covers 10% of my costs.
The very existance of government and regulations throws everything on it's head. For example, you know about the "marriage tax penalty". What is that? It's a penalty based on the bizarre notion that, if you have two people making money, but they are pooling resources, they don't "need" as much of their money, so government should take more.
Hence, two people making $50,000 each, and living alone, will pay less in taxes than if the same two people decide to live together and codify that arrangement with a marriage or civil union license -- because the government taxes them on $100,000, pushing half the income into a higher tax bracket.
Then the government comes up with a half-dozen ways to "fix" that problem, and pretends they are doing you a favor, like giving you different tax tables, giving you extra deductions, giving you a child tax credit.
All because government is basing taxes on what they think you should be able to afford, rather than a straightforward cost of services provided.
I have co-workers who seem to think that as the pool will be bigger the costs will decrease. I pointed out to them that the pool will be bigger but the payers will be the same.
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