November 11, 2008
UT refuses to offer domestic partner benefits
Apparently, UT has decided that it 'can't' offer domestic partner benefits because of state law. Which is pretty funny since the City of Austin and my employer do.
With more than 80,000 employees, the University of Texas is one of the largest employers in the state. None of these employees are given the option of domestic partner benefits.On top of watching states around the nation give in to bigotry, UT employees, living in a state that already has a Defense of Marriage Act in place, cannot even offer their partners health protection. It would be a tragedy if, while the battle for marriage rages in blue states, the families of gay and lesbian couples in the red states were left completely unprotected.
The costs are already apparent, as the story of John Clark, a UT professor, shows: "When I received a generous offer from Case Western Reserve that included a substantial salary increase and full domestic partner benefits for Michael Larvey, my partner of 29 years, I was sorely tempted to leave UT. But it was Michael who insisted that I shouldn't disrupt my academic life for his sake. As a self-employed designer, he was paying about $400 per month for health insurance that offered no physician, no prescription plan, and an 80-20 payout after meeting a $5,000 deductible. In fact, when the insurance company raised the premium in October of last year, he decided to go to a 50-50 plan to save $100 per month. In December he went into congestive heart failure and into the hospital twice. [He had two operations.] The second operation (the procedure alone costing $70,000) helped enormously and put him on the mend, but we faced huge medical bills.Two lessons to this bitter tale: 1) If Michael had been paying for UT-Select [The University of Texas medical insurance], he would have had a primary care physician who could have detected the problem before it got so grave; 2) the salary increase I got in my counteroffer from UT didn't help much when it came to Michael's medical bills; they devastated our finances."
Campus groups met with University President Powers, imploring him to offer these benefits – he said he would 'look into it', and returned later citing Texas insurance code that defined couples only as a man and a woman. Yet other universities, with similar laws on the books, have found ways to offer DPB to their employees. President Powers is not exploring these options.
Please take a moment to let UT President Douche Von Doucherson know his excuse is bullshit.
Posted by mcblogger at November 11, 2008 09:37 AM
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