If you have health insurance, then you most likely got it as a benefit of your job. You probably added your spouse to the policy so that he or she was covered as well. If you end up getting a divorce, then your ex is no longer eligible for coverage through your health insurance. This doesn’t necessarily mean that your ex actually stopped using your insurance, however. You may want to check on that.
When a couple gets divorced, this can cause changes to every type of insurance policy that either person had their name on while they were still married. Most people realize that they will need to take their ex off their auto insurance, and homeowners insurance. Some may want to change their life insurance policy so that their ex is no longer the beneficiary.
Not everyone remembers to go through all the steps that will remove their ex from their health insurance, though. This can lead to big problems.
In Montgomery, Alabama, the boards that oversee health insurance coverage for state, public education, and local government employees did an audit. Their purpose was to purge ineligible former spouses out of the system. In this case, it was discovered that hundreds of ex-spouses of state, public education, and local government employees were still using the health insurance that they were no longer eligible to use. This added up to $4 million in undeserved medical benefits.
The audit revealed that one ex-spouse of an employee received $1 million in health care coverage. Another one had $500,000 of medical bills covered by insurance that the person was no longer legally eligible to continue to use. The board is considering this to be fraudulent behavior.
In addition to potentially being charged with fraud, there are other consequences that could happen in situations like this. The ex-spouse could legally be required to pay back all of the money that the insurance company spent on that person’s health care coverage. The person who is legally eligible for coverage by the employer sponsored health insurance policy, (the ex who is the employee), could also be required to pay back the money that the insurer spent on their ex’s health care.
What happens if neither person pays back the money that is owed to the insurer? The employee might find that his or her health insurance has been canceled, due to “non-payment”. It wouldn’t necessarily matter if that employee was faithfully paying his or her premiums the entire time. This is obviously going to cause big problems for the employee who had the health insurance. The ex spouse, however, might not actually care about the stress that he or she is causing to his or her ex.
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