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.