UI extends health care
November 10, 2004
Thanks to a new contract signed with the University, graduate employees now have the option of providing their same-sex domestic partners with access to the same health care and medical insurance plans that married spouses enjoy.
“The basic thing domestic partners have is, for the most part, the same rights as a married couple has,” said David Rowland, stewards council co-chair for the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO). “So they have the right to buy into McKinley coverage and the medical plan.”
Rowland said the contract didn’t provide graduate students with as much coverage as they wanted, but they were pleased to get as much as they did.
“We wanted to have dependent coverage for spouses and domestic partners,” he said. “We wanted more than we got. But it was very much on our agenda to have spouses and domestic partners afforded equal respect.”
The GEO contract was ratified in August and the benefits went into effect at the beginning of the fall semester. Rowland said that before the contract, graduate students had access to some benefits but no guarantees.
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“Prior to this, it was common practice to let partners buy in to at least the McKinley coverage, but it wasn’t guaranteed or publicized very well,” he said. “With the contract, the right to buy into it is guaranteed.”
Mary Ellen O’Shaughnessey, associate director of Academic Human Resources, said the GEO benefits are similar to the benefits provided to faculty and staff, but there was a key difference.
“Students have to buy their own insurance for their spouses or domestic partners from our plans, while faculty and staff can get part of the cost of their plans reimbursed,” O’Shaughnessey said.
O’Shaughnessey said there were multiple reasons the University extended these benefits to domestic partners.
“We wanted to offer our gay and lesbian employees, to a degree, the same benefits all our employees had. It’s just the right thing to do,” she said. “Also, it was to stay competitive. Most other Big Ten schools offer those benefits already.”
Rowland said even with those reasons, the GEO still had to fight for the benefits.
“We did have to negotiate for the benefits, but this was part of a broader thing, where we were looking for non-discrimination clauses in other things to make sure our members were not discriminated against,” he said. “We did have to fight for things like this.”
Gay and lesbian advocates on campus have said the benefits are a step in the right direction. Curt McKay, co-director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Concerns office, said he was pleased with the GEO contract.
“I think the fact that the GEO contract is beginning to allow same-sex domestic partners to have the same benefits as spouses is a good thing,” McKay said. “Our goal for both graduate students and faculty and staff is for domestic partners to have equivalent benefits to married spouses.”