Marital Status Discrimination and Health
Featured Guest Blogger December 17th, 2009
Liz Weiss is a policy analyst with the Center for American Progress and author of “ Unmarried and Uninsured.” Her work focuses on the economic security of unmarried women, emphasizing employment and workplace issues.
Much of workplace and public policies provide benefits or coverage only to an outdated notion of family: married people and their children. The unmarried worker is too often excluded, and the consequences are clear in health insurance and caregiving policy.
As marriage rates have fallen, today nearly half of American adults (46 percent) are unmarried. These workers are not without families, though. Unmarried workers may have aging parents, siblings, long-time partners, best friends since childhood, the grandparent who raised them, to suggest a few—whom they would like to support or care for, or vice versa.
But the unmarried worker’s adult relationships often do not qualify for family or dependent benefits. While non-spousal intimate relationships are gaining acceptance and recognition, these and “other” relationships are still too often not recognized as equal to or as important as marital relationships.
Few workplace policies will allow a worker to provide health insurance coverage to the person of his or her choosing, although the number of large firms offering domestic partner coverage is increasing. A worker without a spouse will not be able to support his closest relative, especially if they are non-intimate relatives, no matter the circumstances, while the married coworker may include her spouse on her health plan, even if that spouse has his or her own offer of coverage.
Similarly, federal policy treats spouses as family, but consistently leaves little or no leeway for other adult relationships. For instance, COBRA continuing health coverage does not require continued coverage of domestic partners, even if they had been covered by a laid-off worker’s employer-based health plan. The Family and Medical Leave Act—the only national policy for job-protected leave—only allows leave for oneself, one’s (opposite-sex) spouse, or one’s children. And married gay and lesbian workers are prevented from receiving the same benefits as opposite-sex spouses because of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which applies to all federal law and defines a spouse as a member of the opposite sex.
And it works in the other direction, too. Unmarried workers will rarely have anyone who is qualified under law to give “family care.” If an unmarried worker becomes sick, the FMLA will not protect the job of the brother, cousin, or friend who would like to take time off to care for his loved one.
Several bills pending in Congress would expand the FMLA to other relationships, and there is significant movement on including domestic partnerships in other areas of law, but policymakers can do better. As work-leave policies, like paid sick days or paid paternity leave, are considered, they should go beyond the outdated notion of a nuclear family and embrace inclusivity.
A possible alternative to the government or employer choosing a worker’s most important relationships is for a worker to make that choice herself. One promising idea is the simple and fair “plus-one” concept for health insurance championed by the Alternatives to Marriage Project. This would allow workers to receive health benefits, “plus one,” allowing the worker to cover one nondependent adult plus any tax dependents. This could also be limited to adults in the worker’s household. That “one” could be a spouse, but would not have to be. This idea could be a building block for future workplace and public policies concerning benefits and family leave.
