Divorce and Health Insurance Benefits

How divorce affects your health insurance?

One of the problems couples contemplating getting divorced have to confront is how to continue availing of health insurance benefits after the divorce.  Sometimes the husband and wife may both have employment, but only one of the spouses has a job that offers health insurance benefits.  Then, in other cases, one of the spouses is unemployed but is covered by the family health insurance benefits provided by the other partner’s employer.  When such couples go in for a divorce, they cannot be considered to be family members and therefore the spouse who was dependent on the other partner for getting health insurance benefits can no longer be covered by their partner’s health insurance policy.

Since health insurance is essential for everyone to ensure they can cope with the rising costs of health care, such couples need to find a way out so that both of them and their children can continue to enjoy health insurance coverage.

Health insurance is not always cheap. In cases where the cost of getting a separate health insurance policy for the dependent spouse after a divorce would be too high, they have a way to continue the benefits without any additional cost.  And that is to put off the divorce for some time and opt for a separation agreement instead.  Thus the couple can stay married and continue to be covered by the same insurance plan despite being separated.  The separation could help them prolong the period of enjoying health insurance benefits cost- effectively for some more time.  This way the partner without independent health insurance gets some time to work out a more permanent solution.

But separation could pose some problems, like for instance, the working partner’s tax filing status could be affected.  Then, implementing a separation agreement is difficult in some states.  In other states, one spouse may be permitted to get insurance benefits provided by the separation agreement for around a year or two and later legally seek other types of financial relief applicable after divorce.  However, you’ll have to take the advice of a licensed divorce attorney on these issues.  An experienced attorney would also be able to suggest other options to couples who absolutely want to get divorced without any delay.

For example, attorneys often suggest COBRA coverage to eligible couples.  This is a federal law that gives eligible individuals covered under any health insurance policy the right to continue coverage for a specific time period, but at their own cost.  For example, let’s say you have got a divorce and formerly you were covered under the family health insurance coverage provided by your ex-spouse’s employer, then the employer would be bound to provide you with COBRA coverage even after the divorce for a fixed time period.

The COBRA coverage would be under the same policy as before.  However, your coverage would now not be family, but individual, and instead of the employer, you would be required to pay the premium for that individual policy.  Very often, the unemployed spouse or the one earning a lesser income opts for COBRA coverage and then gets their spouse to pay for the coverage for a fixed period after the divorce.  This gives the spouse without independent coverage time to either get a job with coverage or earn enough money to pay for their own policy.