Schools Want to be Allowed to Insure Domestic Partners
Latest push for benefits
Online Athens
By Lee Shearer
August 14, 2008

The Medical College of Georgia will join the University of Georgia and Georgia State University in calling on the Board of Regents to allow health insurance for domestic partners.

Faculty at MCG voted by more than a 2-to-1 in an online poll in favor of a resolution asking the regents to allow the benefits, said Bill Andrews, vice chairman of the Medical College of Georgia's Academic Council.

MCG President Dan Rahn now will convey the resolution to the regents, the appointed body that oversees the University System of Georgia, the state's 35 public colleges and universities.

Andrews said 126 faculty members voted in favor of the resolution, 58 against. More than 900 full-time and part-time faculty members were eligible to vote, but only a fraction cast ballots, he said.

University of Georgia President Michael Adams and Georgia State University President Carl Patton took similar resolutions to University System of Georgia administrators last year, but so far, those administrators have not put the resolution on the regents' meeting agenda.

In October, faculty councils at both schools unanimously endorsed resolutions, calling for the universities to provide health insurance and other benefits to employees' domestic partners.

Advocates say the universities sorely need to provide the benefits in order to recruit good employees, even as salaries have slipped in comparison to national averages over the past several years.

At the growing number of universities and businesses that offer domestic partner benefits, most who sign up are opposite-sex couples rather than same-sex - about 9-to-1, according to research by the Williams Institute, a California think tank.

Usually, the total cost of providing benefits increases by about 1 percent when an employer provides benefits for employees' domestic partners, according to a research report Georgia State University faculty members prepared before the GSU Faculty Senate voted on partner benefits.