The Legal Issues 159
obligations. The result can be that we divorce lawyers are wit-
nessing an overall increase in custody battles that seem to be more
concerned with the high amounts of child-support money at stake
than they are with the actual custody.
The bottom line on child support. The situation has now evolved
to where most noncustodial parents throughout the country pay
their child support by way of a wage assignment. Payments are
no longer either voluntary or direct to the custodial spouse. Fur-
thermore, the amounts of child support generated under these
guidelines are generally substantially higher than the figures that
were ordered or settled upon previously (although many would
argue that they are still not nearly as high as the true cost of rais-
ing kids).
Medical Insurance
Divorce is the psychological equivalent of a triple coronary bypass.
—Mary Kay Blakely
Maintaining medical insurance after divorce has traditionally
been an area where an unemployed spouse often gets the short
end of the stick. This problem stems from the fact that, once you
are divorced, you are no longer your spouse’s legal dependent.
Hence, you are no longer eligible to participate under their medi-
cal insurance coverage.
The result has been extremely unfair, and enough societal
pressure was finally brought that Congress enacted a law called
COBRA (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of
1996), which attempts to at least partially deal with this prob-
lem. The law now requires most private employers of more than
twenty people to maintain former spouses on the company’s
group health insurance policy for a period of up to three years
following the divorce. The recipient spouse will generally have
to be responsible for making the monthly payments themselves,
but at least the coverage is available to them.
This represents a substantial improvement over the previ-
ous rule that the dependent spouse had to be cut off from the
employed spouse’s group health plan at the time of the divorce.