If an employer offers insurance benefits to the employee, can they exclude dependents?
February 9th, 2010 | 
Author: Can they choose to only cover the employee? If so are they allowed to pick and choose whose dependents can be covered? Like one employee’s child is covered, but the other employees aren’t allowed to get insurance for their dependents, is that legal?
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Yes, an employer can only choose to cover the employee and not any dependents.
And the employer can establish classifications where certain employees may be able to add dependents, but another group of employees may not.
If you think there is an act of discrimination happening in your company, you may want to discuss it with HR and find out why that situation is happening. (Or you could add more details here, so that we could better answer your question.)
They can choose what coverage to offer and not offer, but the rules should apply equally to all employees. It sounds like there is more to the story…
I’m in CA and can only speak for what I know in this state. If it is a "carve-out" plan they can offer different levels of benefits. For example: If employee’s are classified based on position or time on the job they can have two different benefit structures. But if you are talking about two employee’s working the same job (like two Customer Service Representatives) then they have to offer the same benefits. It may be different in other states.
Is your employer refusing to pay for your dependents or are they refusing to allow you to add them and have the premium deducted from your check?
You can offer it to just the employee, or employee and dependents. You can’t say, I’ll cover two of your kids, but not the other two.
You can say, "ok, class A employees can have coverage for employee and dependents, but class B employees can only have coverage for employee." That’s legal, too. And the employer gets to define the classes.