Teachers in Utah’s Salt Lake City School District will be receiving insurance benefits in the coming school year. This is quite a different result than what happened with teachers in Wisconsin earlier this year. Utah’s teachers will be able to extend their health insurance benefits to their domestic partners.
For many people, teaching is a calling. No one becomes a teacher in order to become wealthy, because we all know that America’s teachers really do not get paid very much money at all. Teaching might be one of the most demanding, stressful, exhausting jobs that exists. It’s not easy to attempt to motivate a group of bored students into learning about a topic that they simply do not care about in the least bit. Despite this, there are some truly amazing people who not only choose teaching as a career, but who find it rewarding.
In my opinion, the least we can do is to make sure these brave souls are properly taken care of is to ensure that they have some form of health insurance coverage. The school district in Salt Lake City, Utah, is doing just that. Teachers and other school employees will be getting health insurance benefits in the coming school year.
As usual, these benefits will extend to their spouses and children. The difference this year is that the school district is allowing the health insurance to be extended to the school employee’s domestic partner. This is valid if the partner happens to be of the opposite sex of the employee, or if the partner happens to be of the same sex as the employee.
The school district is changing over from the insurance company that they used to work with to SelectHealth. One of the reasons why is so that school employees could add a domestic partner to their insurance coverage without having their premiums increase as a result. Instead, they will pay the same rate as an employee who added his or her spouse to the coverage.
This works in a similar way to the employee health insurance benefits that are being offered to people who work for the Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County, or the Park City governments. Those employees who have a spouse can select to add their spouse to their health insurance. Those who do not have a spouse are allowed to choose an “adult designee”, who can be added to the health insurance. The adult designee can be any financially dependent household member. This could mean a partner of either sex or even an aging parent.
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