My wife and I are separating,can I keep her on my medical insurance.Does my employer have any say in this?

Sweet jesus you have gotten some potentially misleading answers here.

Question - are you going to be *legally* separated, or are you just going to stop living together for awhile? That makes a difference.

An employer *can* define their benefit plan to state that a legally separated spouse is no longer eligible for insurance benefits. Do all employers choose to do that? No. But you need to find out if your employer is one who does.

A few ways you can check...

- Look at your benefit booklet (aka Summary Plan Description, aka Certificate of Coverage, etc.) under the Eligibility section. If a legally separated spouse is no longer eligible on your particular employer's plan, it would say so right in your document.

- Ask your HR rep what happens if you legally separate. Will your wife continue to be eligible?

(Again - this all is in reference to *legal separation* where a court document is filed. If you're just not going to be living together anymore but not filing papers with the court, then she can stay on until you're divorced.)

Its a good idea to double check before filing the separation papers. I used to do dependent eligibility audits for large corporations, and there were several instances where we discovered a legal separation and retroactively terminated the spouse back to the date of the legal separation. (Which means that payments were taken back for all of her claims between the legal separation and the date it was discovered.)

In conclusion...yes, your employer could have say in it, if they chose to define a legally separated spouse in the benefit plan as "ineligible." The only way you can know for sure whether your particular employer made that choice is to look at your plan guidelines and/or ask your HR rep.

Here are some links for reference showing that some employers can choose to make a legally separated spouse lose health insurance coverage (again, not all employers use that criteria...but none of us here can say whether *yours* does):

From a legal site giving divorce advice to women:
http://www.womansdivorce.com/separation-advice.html#INSURANCE

Benefit sites from a few employers showing that they treat legally separated and divorced spouses the same (loss of coverage):
http://www.wgaplans.org/html/HSPD00120.htm
http://benefitspd.saic.com/life-events/get-divorced-legally-separated.html

Oregon Department of Insurance Information showing that legally separated spouses are considered the same as divorced (for insurance purposes):
http://www.oregoninsurance.org/forms/miscellaneous/3892.pdf

(look at the paragraph "qualifying events" here...)
http://www.pueblo.gsa.gov/cic_text/employ/cobra/cobra.htm#whois

You get the idea...at any rate, the only way you can know how your particular employer handles legal separation is to ask. Its completely wrong for someone who doesn't know your specific employer's policy to say that "your wife can't be kicked off if you separate."