Kentucky spousal surcharge

[just me]

Jurisdiction

Kentucky

both my spouse and I are working full time for companies that offer health insurance. We both pay family plan premiums for each plan and have one covered child whose primary coverage is my insurance due to my date of birth being earlier in the year than my husband's date of birth. Each of us is considered to have each other's insurance coverage as secondary coverage, with our specific company plan covering us as primary coverage for that individual. My question is this: my company is now stating they will be adding a surcharge amount monthly to my premium payment for continuing to keep my husband on my policy with secondary coverage. He still remains primarily covered by his own company's policy. is this correct? can my company add this surcharge?

 

[cbg]

It is correct if your employer says it is. If what you mean to ask is, is it legal, yes it is, and yes they can add a surcharge. Employer are not required to add such a surcharge, but they are not prohibited from doing so either.

As someone who has been working with employer-based benefits for much closer to 40 years than I really want to admit, I've gotta tell you that you're probably wasting a lot of money by carrying two policies. The secondary policy is unlikely to pick up the full balance left unpaid by the primary policy. You're really paying for nothing unless one policy is considerably better than the other, and they both can't be better than the other. It would be far more cost effective of you to pick the better of the two policies and drop the other one.

 

[txls]

I agree. If you don't want to pay the surcharge then drop the coverage. Now if your coverage is much better than your husband's, it might be worth the surcharge.