UPS to End Insurance Coverage for 15,000 Working Spouses
By Mary Jane Credeur & Alex Nussbaum - Aug 21, 2013 4:34 PM ET .
United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS), one of the biggest U.S. employers, plans to drop health insurance coverage for about 15,000 working spouses of white-collar employees to curtail rising costs.
Many spouses in the U.S. workforce will have access to employer-provided insurance under President Barack Obama’s health care-system overhaul, and UPS will remove them from its coverage, according to a copy of a memo to employees first published online by Kaiser Health News. Spouses who don’t work or lack employer-provided benefits will still be eligible at Atlanta-based UPS, according to the memo.
In its memo, UPS said the coverage shift is a response to expenses from the 2010 Affordable Care Act and “the rising cost of health care in general.” U.S. businesses have been increasing premiums to cover working spouses for years, said Paul Fronstin, a director at the Washington-based Employee Benefit Research Institute. Still, he said the total exclusion by UPS may be a first for a company its size.
“Is it a harbinger of things to come? Possibly,” Fronstin said in a telephone interview. “Once a major employer like UPS takes a step, all of the others will at least start looking at it.”
UPS, the world’s largest package-delivery company, had about 399,000 employees at the end of 2012, according to a filing. Of 33,000 spouses on UPS’s health plan, about 15,000 are eligible for coverage through their own employers and won’t be covered by UPS starting next year, according to the memo. The insurance change doesn’t apply to 250,000 Teamsters union workers or to employees outside the U.S., according to the memo.
more:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-21/ups-to-end-insurance-coverage-for-15-000-working-spouses.html
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