Fourteen months after the Supreme Court enshrined same-sex marriage as a right, many LGBT Americans are still unaware of the effect the ruling has had on their health and retirement benefits.
A comprehensive survey by Radnor, Pennsylvania-based Lincoln Financial Group about trends in employer-sponsored benefits finds that most LGBT employees didn’t look into whether the Supreme Court ruling affected the benefits available to them and their partners.
“Our research shows still only about a third of those in the LGBT community have taken the time to actively reassess or change their benefits selections, which is about what we would expect around this point, given how complex many of these decisions are going to be,” Eric Reisenwitz, who heads the group benefits division at Lincoln Financial, told Plan Sponsor.
In fact, half of LGBT employees told Lincoln that they were not sure about what effect, if any, the ruling had on their benefits.
Employers have long been ahead of politicians on the issue of marriage equality. Many businesses, particularly those with national or international reach, began offering benefits to employees in domestic partnerships years before same-sex marriage was legalized in many states. Such benefits were recognized as an important recruitment and retention tool as well as a good way to improve or maintain the company’s public image.
A 2015 survey of Fortune 500 companies by the Human Rights Campaign, a Washington, D.C.-based LGBT rights advocacy group, found that the great majority had in place workplace and benefits tailored to LGBT employees. Eighty-nine percent had policies that explicitly prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation, two-thirds prohibited discrimination based on gender identity and two-thirds provided health insurance to domestic partners.
According to a Wall Street Journal legal analysis last year, employers that contract with outside insurers to provide health benefits would be legally barred by the court ruling to distinguish between same-sex spouses and opposite-sex spouses for the purpose of benefits.
Self-insured employers might be able to make that distinction, but again, most self-insured businesses are large, international companies that have likely been offering LGBT-friendly benefits for years.
As a result of both the finality of the Supreme Court decision and most employers’ support for LGBT benefits, there have not been any meaningful legal battles prompted by the business community on the issue.
If anything, the court ruling made things easier for many employers that were already offering domestic partnership benefits. Such companies that were operating in states without legal protections for same-sex couples often did not enjoy the same tax breaks for the benefits they offered to the partners of gay employees.
However, there are clearly still plenty of LBGT workers in the dark. As a result, states the Lincoln Financial report, it’s in a company’s interest to make sure they know what is available to them and their loved ones.
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