So here's the situation, I'm wondering if anyone else is in a similar boat and has any suggestions. My wife and I both have good jobs that each provide employer-subsidized health insurance. Each employer demands that if your spouse is employed, then he/she must purchase primary health insurance for himself/herself from his/her own employer.
My plan is wicked good. It's one of these new so-called high-deductible consumer-driven plans. The way it works is I pay about $200 a month in premiums for myself plus family. Lots of basic stuff is 100% covered in-network (annual physicals, most vaccines, etc). I presume my employer pays some premium too, but I'm not sure how much. Then, my employer contributes about $2,000 to a Health Account. (Note, this is not an HSA or HRA where you reimburse yourself for out of pocket expenses. This is an account that only the employer can contribute to, and only the insurance provider can deduct from) The insurance provider, when given a bill for services rendered, determines how much it will pay if it's not 100% covered, and then takes the money out of that Health Account to pay for it. Every month I get a statement showing the balance in that account. The best part is, if the money in the account isn't used, it rolls over forever. So since there are no chronic conditions in my family, we hardly ever spend any of the money, we currently have over $10,000 in that account, and it grows every year. If something catastrophic happens, then they draw that account down to zero, at which point I am responsible for a "bridge payment" of about $15,000 (that's the high-deductible part), and beyond that it mostly works like a more traditional insurance plan where I am responsible for 10% to 20% of the remaining cost, depending on what it is. (So I can still go bankrupt, yay!)
So, to reiterate, I can insure my entire family on this plan for about $200 in premiums per month. And I have a savings cushion to deal with the bridge payment if it comes to that.
The problem is I live in a state that follows the "Birthday Rule", which says that the primary insurance provider for each child must be the primary insurance provider for the parent whose birthday falls earliest in the calendar year. This means that my children must be on my wife's plan (My plan is the secondary insurance for them). Currently my wife pays about $900 per month in premiums for herself and our oldest daughter (I am not on her plan at all). Our second daughter was born yesterday, and looking over the paperwork, it seems that our premiums will now increase by about $600 dollars a month.
Has anyone else been in a similar situation, and could anything be done about it? Ideally I'd like to make my plan the primary plan for my kids and drop my wife's coverage altogether for them (and invest the $1000 or so monthly premiums so we can get off the treadmill sooner!). I did some research, and it seems that the only legal way around the problem is to get divorced and have a family court judge arbitrarily declare which parent's insurance is primary and which is secondary. I don't think that's in the cards for us. Any suggestions?
