Benefits Swap

I have a single employee, currently enrolled in our group health plan, who is getting married to someone who does not work with us in April. He wants to drop our health insurance group plan in favor of joining his bride's group plan with her employer when he gets married. But he has asked our business owner if we would be willing to pay his new wife's monthly premium. He's arguing that it would be cheaper for the company to do this instead of carrying him and his wife on our health care, and our boss likes the idea.

Is this legit? I'm worried that it might be discriminatory (wouldn't we have to offer to pay for all our employee's spouses health care premiums?) Are we going down a road we don't want to travel? Or is this a clever way to reduce health care costs. I'm not an HR expert, just the poor guy assigned to these duties in the office, and I really could use some guidance. We're located in Pennsylvania.

This is an excellent question, for which I don't know the answer. So, I'm publishing it anyway! I used to work for a company that did just that, but that was 11 years ago, I was an admin, and I certainly wasn't in on any of the discussions. It was in New York State, if that helps any. I worked with some fine people, so I presume they did their legal checking, but it was also a very small company, so who knows?

Anybody know the answer to this, or how to proceed? I would never want a policy where you paid the whole amount of the spouse's insurance increase.

I would just raise everyone's salary by $200 (or whatever) and increase the amount they paid towards their own benefits by $200, so if they didn't take the insurance, they would have the extra $200. But, of course, once you did that, people would forget about that and you'd run into the same situation later.