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UPS, for instance, announced this year that it plans to drop health insurance benefits for working spouses of its nonunion employees if they can get coverage elsewhere, starting Jan. 1. The Atlanta-based company, which employs about 323,000 people in the United States, estimates that 15,000 of the 33,000 spouses it covers will be dropped. The University of Virginia also decided to drop coverage for spouses, starting Jan. 1, if the spouse has access through his or her own employer to affordable health care. The university's health plan covers about 20,000 people. The Associated Press also will require spouses of non-union employees in the U.S. to seek coverage from their own employer, starting Jan. 1. Those spouses still will be able to enroll in AP's plan for secondary coverage, which could provide an added level of payment once the spouse's main insurance has paid out its coverage on a claim. The AP, which has 1,785 full-time employees in the U.S., also is negotiating a similar requirement for union-covered U.S. workers. McGregor McCance, a spokesman for the University of Virginia, said that the university "wants to take steps today that can help it provide good benefits in the future but also contain the rising costs caused by a variety of sources." The exclusion of spouses will likely grow faster among smaller employers. Those companies have faced big cost hikes in recent years, in part because they have less negotiating leverage over the premiums they pay. They are more likely to be aggressive in corralling costs. But overall, companies have to consider spousal exclusions carefully before taking such a step, said Randall Abbott, a senior health care consultant with Towers Watson. "You can't just do what everybody else does," Abbott said. "You have to step back and say,
'What would this mean to my employee population?' It's a pretty complicated decision."
[Associated
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