PRINTRestricted benefits
MU policy bars domestic partners
April 24, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Health insurance might not be on anyone’s wedding registry. But a marriage license is a requirement for couples to receive full medical benefits from the University of Missouri System. This policy is similar to many employers in the U.S. For couples who aren’t allowed to marry — and even for those who choose not to tie the knot — the partners could go without.
Michael Brown, coordinator for LGBT student involvement and leadership, councils many doctoral students who are looking for teaching jobs. “Mizzou is not on their radar because if their partner is unemployed for six months, they can’t get them healthcare,” he says.
J. Heim, a Residential Life student services advisor for MU, says he has several friends at MU whose same-sex partners had to get on-campus jobs to take advantages of the medical benefits. Other LGBT employees were unwilling to go on record about the issue, which Heim feels is a reflection of the school’s culture. “We talk about how we need to be open to students,” he says, “but those students also need role models who are out and accepted at the university.”
Heim openly identifies as gay but says the policy wasn’t a big part of his initial decision to take a job at MU. “It plays more into how long I’ll stay here,” he says. He adds that worrying about your partner’s health insurance is something married couples don’t have to think about.
Under the state constitution, same-sex partners aren’t allowed to marry. MU is a publicly funded school, and about 15 percent of the expense to insure employees and their spouses comes from state coffers, according to Michael Paden, associate vice president of benefits of the UM System.
But this state law doesn’t have to prevent domestic partners from receiving benefits from the system. The 2004 constitutional amendment provides no mention of marriage-like benefits. “The current amendment would not preclude an entity like the University of Missouri from offering domestic-partnership benefits,” says A.J. Bockelman, executive director of Promo, a statewide LGBT advocacy group.
For example, Michigan, which has an even stronger marriage amendment, still bestowed domestic partnership benefits to public university employees.
Washington University in St. Louis, a privately funded school, has given benefits to domestic partners for about a decade. But who qualifies as a domestic partner? In order to receive domestic-partner benefits at Washington University, a person can’t be married, says Brown. He gives the examples of homosexual couples as well as heterosexual foreign graduate students who are prohibited from marrying by a work visa.
Companies and organizations can solve the dilemma with a signed affidavit, in which employees must swear they live with their partner, are in a committed relationship and share most of their finances. But some point to this definition as more restrictive than many heterosexual marriages.
At MU, any policy change to include same-sex couples and any other domestic partnerships would be large and expensive — the university already spends about $23 million a year on spousal medical insurance alone — and would therefore be required to go through the Board of Curators.
“Really, the leaders in this have been the corporate world,” says Bockelman. “It’s not just gays and lesbians and our families but also unmarried couples who are struggling to meet basic healthcare needs. Ultimately it’s about insuring more people.” And insuring more people is, in the end, about deeper pockets.
