Well, yes and no. In the UPS announcement (linked to here, at the Via Meadia blog), UPS specifically attributes the new policy to costs from ObamaCare, but more honestly that was a case of the straw that broke the camel’s back.
This policy — providing coverage only to spouses who do not have an alternate health insurance option — is hardly novel. I could go into my employer’s benefits database and pull up a statistic on the percentage of employers who distinguish between working & “dependent” spouses in this way, but I’d guess my employer wouldn’t approve of my using company resources in that manner. So let’s just a significant minority of employers do so. Maybe even more have started to since I changed roles and am no longer working as closely with American employee benefits.
(I suspect this may even hit my family in the next benefit enrollment cycle, since I’m on my husband’s health insurance — because I work part-time, my cost for participating in my employer’s health insurance would be higher than the additional premium of being a dependent on my husband’s insurance.)
Fact is, employers are looking at all kinds of ways of controlling their benefits costs. My employer is promoting to its clients — and we as employees had to participate in not long ago — a dependent eligibility audit, in which we had to provide marriage licenses (this was surprisingly hard to find — I don’t think we’d needed it since the wedding) and birth certificates. Wellness programs are becoming increasingly widespread, although, at least at my firm, it’s still optional, and the reward for participating is modest. The percentage of subsidy for dependents is shrinking. And, of course, the company long ago priced its health insurance options so that only the high-deductible plan makes sense. What’s more, periodically, the firm releases survey data indicating that an increasing number of employers are considering bailing — either not providing health insurance at all, or abandoning their efforts at cost control and just passing all future cost increases onto employees. (Whether this will actually happen or is just an expression of employer frustration, I don’t know.)
It’s true that all the additional fees and requirements are making employer-provided healthcare more expensive (and the Kaiser study saying otherwise isn’t apples-to-apples, if employers are controlling costs by reducing benefits), but, even absent ObamaCare and government regulations in general, employer-sponsored healthcare isn’t sustainable. That’s why I keep harping on VoucherCare (as much in my comments on other blogs as on this blog), since the “status quo” will collapse one way or the other.
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