[quote=spdrun]Bearishgurl, so you’re saying that people should be forced into having two-working-parent families by overly high insurance premiums?
Remember that child-care is ALSO expensive. If this enables more families to have only one breadwinner (or causes families to have both parents working less than full time), this can only be a good thing. Americans work too much, too hard as it is. We should be more like the French.
(The economic problems in France come from other sources, like the difficulty of firing bad employees.)[/quote]
No, what I am saying is that US employers who provide costly full (or nearly full) spouse health coverage are discriminating against single employees, including unattached lesbian and gay employees.
In this day and age, having children is a choice, and, whether single or married, the cost of child care goes along with the territory. Why should employees who don’t have children or will never have children subsidize the healthcare cost of employees who choose to leave an able-bodied adult at home with or without children and cover them (mostly with employer money)? Just because an employee has an unemployed “partner” doesn’t mean that he/she is “worth more” to an employer than one of their single employees.
I’m not against nuclear families with one worker but I am against paying an employee more because that is their chosen lifestyle. When an employer gives a(n) (often $500+ mo) “subsidy” to an employee in the form of a healthcare allowance which other employees aren’t eligible for because of marital status, that is real money being paid to the married employee which amounts to unjust enrichment to only a portion of employees based upon marital (or RDP) status.
This is the main reason why large govm’t employers such as the City of SD changed over to having “cafeteria plans” in recent years. EVERY represented employee gets ~$6600 to spend per year on healthcare, including dental and vision care if they wish. If they are trying to cover more people than themselves with that, they are going to have a lot taken from their checks every payday UNLESS they sign up for the cheapest Kaiser HMO for everyone in their family, in which case they will have ~$175 mo taken out of their pay for spouse coverage.
