Canada Health Insurance

Health Insurance for Domestic Partnership

The first private business to offer health insurance benefits for domestic partners was the Village Voice Newspaper in 1982. The first Canadian Province to offer such benefits was Quebec in 1982. And the first municipality in the U.S. to follow suit was Berkeley, California in 1984.

A domestic partnership can be defined as: partners who are unmarried, same sex or opposite sex, who live together and seek both economic and non-economic benefits as those that are granted to their married counterparts.

Some of these economic and non-economic benefits include:

• health insurance
• life insurance
• vision insurance
• sick and bereavement leave
• accident insurance
• death benefits
• parental leave
• housing rights
• tuition fee reduction at universities
• use of recreational facilities

Supplemental health insurance as well as “no-cost” benefits such as sick leave or bereavement leave to care for a partner or the partner’s child should be considered. In terms of supplemental health insurance, any couple including non-married couples, married couples and same-sex couples can benefit from “couple” rates which are less expensive than two individual plans. Such insurance would cover dental care, vision care, prescription drugs as well as a number of other medical and para-medical benefits not covered by your provincial plan.