Plan gets Medical Child Support Order, but employee did not sign up fo

[Guest awallace2]

We received a child support order that includes an order to enroll the children in the health plan.

If the employee did not sign up for health insurance for himself, do we just enroll the children, or enroll the employee, also?

[Guest Debbie Button]

For my company, without too much thought on this, my "gut" tells me to enroll the employee. Our plan states that if dependent coverage is wanted then employee must take coverage for himself first. So the employee must be enrolled, and then the dependents can be enrolled based upon the QMSO.

[QDROphile]

The plan cannot be required to provide a benefit that the plan is not designed to provide. So if participant enrollment is required to get dependant coverage, the plan can require participant enrollment. The rub is with how to collect the premiums if the premiums must be paid in full or part by the employee. The order can provide for sufficient payroll deduction to cover premiums with the employee's consent, depending on state law.

However, there is a strange provision in the statute that says that a QMSCO is is a MCSO that "...assigns to an alternate recipient the right to receive benefits for which a participant or beneficiary is eligible... ." Does that mean that the you enroll the child indirectly as assignee of the of the employee, whom you have technically enrolled for the purpose of assigning the benefits to the child? In that case you only enroll the participant and don't enroll the child directly.

Of course, this is nonsense. Whoever wrote the statute did not really understand or think through how medical plans work. They simply used the QDRO model.