Health insurance

My partner and I (who, for the sake of clarity, I will refer to with feminine pronouns throughout this post and future posts on the blog) are planning on living together while I'm in graduate school, and might get married within the next couple of years, depending on where we live. She currently has health insurance through her parents, but will no longer be eligible for it once she turns 23 later this year. She is self-employed, so she will probably have to buy health insurance at an expensive individual rate (at least a few hundred dollars per month for a reasonable plan). The other option would be to live in a place like Massachusetts or San Francisco, both of which subsidize health insurance for low-income residents; however, none of the places we are considering living (San Diego/La Jolla, Berkeley, Palo Alto, Pasadena) have such programs in place, to our knowledge.

If I were employed at a company, getting health insurance for a spouse would be straightforward--we would be able to sign up for the family plan offered by my employer. But it seems that grad student benefits aren't so nice. Today, my partner called the health centers at Scripps, Berkeley, Stanford, and Caltech to find out whether they offer health benefits to spouses or partners of graduate students.

To my surprise, Scripps has hands-down the best spousal coverage: $100 per month for medical insurance, and $18 per month for dental. This is an excellent rate.

Berkeley is apparently working on implementing spousal coverage but for now nothing is in place. She was told that the option might exist a year from now.

Stanford does not offer health plan for spouses/dependents.

Caltech offers a more expensive option for spouses and same-sex domestic partners: $1243 per insurance term (each insurance term lasts four months), plus a $75 charge to access the health center (it's unclear to me if this is a one-time fee or a once-per-term fee).

So it looks like if I do not end up at Scripps it will be somewhat difficult to get reasonably-priced health insurance.