I currently pay 27 dollars twice a month for just myself. I’m looking to add my spouse to my insurance plan. If I add children it increases my premium to 190 a month, if I want my “whole family” covered it gets increased to 245 a month.
Why am I not able to just add my spouse for 55$ a month?
This is some bullshit. Thanks America.
Addendum: Just heard back from HR, this is working as intended.
Generally speaking, health insurance through employment are priced at 3 levels of service:
Generally speaking, each additional person is cheaper than the last additional person. So option 3 is almost always the cheapest per person, with option 2 being pretty cheap per person, and option 1 being the most expensive per person.
That fact is obscured by the fact that generally speaking, employers only give a diminishing subsidy so that they’re covering less and less as you add more people to the plan.
So if option 1 is $250, and option 2 is $400, and option 3 is $500, maybe the employer will contribute $200 for option 1, $250 for option 2, and $300 for option 3 so that your portion of the premium is $50, $150, and $200.
Also the reason why insurance is cheaper per person when a bunch of people bundle together is because there’s less risk of each covered person being really sick, and more likely that it’s just one person in the family who needs a bunch of treatment, so the higher out of pocket max tends to make the per-person cost cheaper for the insurance company, and therefore for the person paying premiums.