Rhino reports many Guilford County employees are “crying foul” because “their spouses will be kicked off the county’s health and dental insurance plans at the end of the year.”
The plan, devised by County Manager Marty Lawing and the Board of Commissioners will no longer cover spouses of county employees if the spouse can get health insurance through their own employers. The county will also “audit the current membership of the county’s healthcare plan to find any ‘spouses’ and ‘dependents’ listed on the county’s plan who are in fact not actually spouses and qualified dependents.”
Commissioner Carolyn Coleman– who —according to the Rhino —“almost always, if not always, takes the employees’ side rather than the taxpayers’ side on these types of matters”—-presented a scenario where the auditing process:
(Coleman) said someone might, for instance, have had a brother who’s been in jail for years and have raised that brother’s child as their own. She said in that case the county employee may have listed the youngster as a child on the county’s insurance because he or she truly was their responsibility and was their child for all intents and purposes.
Perhaps an unusual scenario, though not out of the question.
