By Jennifer Carsen, JD
You are undoubtedly weary of hearing about everything the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires of you in terms of the employee health care coverage you’re mandated to provide.
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Note the phrasing of that last sentence: employee health care coverage. While the ACA mandates that employees’ dependent children be allowed to tag along on a parent’s plan until age 26, you are not, interestingly, required to provide coverage to employees’ spouses.
This has led to an increasing number of spousal benefit “carve-outs” under ACA—we’ll cover you, dear employee, and your young adult children, but your spouse is on his or her own (assuming that said spouse is eligible for coverage elsewhere, usually through his or her own employer’s plan).
Sometimes the carve-out takes the form of a penalty rather than an outright exclusion—i.e., we’ll cover your eligible-elsewhere spouse, but it’s going to cost you extra to add that person to your plan. And sometimes it’s not so much a carve-out as a cash-out: Employees who don’t enroll their spouses are incentivized with monetary rewards.