How Much Do You Have to Pay for Your Ex-Spouse’s Nicotine Habit?
Unhealthy habits can wreck a marriage, just as easily as an obsession with exercise and health food can. Once you get divorced, though, one spouse can indulge in junk food while the other chases a runner’s high, and it doesn’t matter who is right and who is wrong. In a perfect world, the division of marital assets would mean that each spouse gets to keep X amount of marital property, and it is neither spouse’s business how the other spends the money on healthy or unhealthy habits. Your ex is free to vape while you munch alfalfa sprouts; your child support check only supports your children, and its amount comes down to a statewide mathematical formula. In some divorce cases, though, the support obligation involves one former spouse keeping the other as a beneficiary of the first spouse’s employer-provided health insurance coverage, in addition to or instead of paying alimony in cash. For good reason, the cost of healthcare in Florida pleases no one, but it is even worse when you are paying for overpriced healthcare for your ex who does not even make an effort to stay healthy. If you are sick of paying as much as you do for your ex-spouse’s health insurance, contact a Boca Raton divorce lawyer.
Isn’t “Reasonable Health Insurance” an Oxymoron?
Health insurance in the United States is overpriced in the United States, no matter how you look at it, but it is especially expensive in Florida. If the premiums don’t get you, the deductible will, and if you go to an out of network doctor, things only get worse. A South Florida couple divorced after a long marriage; their children were in college when they filed for divorce. The wife had been going to the same primary care physician throughout the marriage; she had also smoked cigarettes through all those years.
One of the provisions of the couple’s marital settlement agreement was that the husband would continue to pay for the wife’s health insurance coverage until she became eligible for Medicare at age 65. Five years after the divorce became final, the health insurance plan became more expensive, and the husband had to choose a new plan. One of the options had a $2,000 deductible, but the wife’s primary care doctor was out of network. For the plan where the wife’s doctor was in network, the deductible was $6,000. The court did not have a simple solution to this problem. There was no question that it was still the husband’s responsibility to provide health insurance for the wife. The trouble was that there was no standard definition of what constitutes reasonable health insurance. If there is a bright side to this story, it is that it is a self-limiting problem, and the wife eventually qualified for Medicare.
Contact Schwartz | White About Health Insurance as Alimony
A South Florida family law attorney can help you if you and your ex-spouse disagree about spousal support in the form of health insurance. Contact Schwartz | White in Boca Raton, Florida about your case.
Source:
scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1532424084024761275&q=divorce+market&hl=en&as_sdt=4,10&as_ylo=2014&as_yhi=2024
