UAB offers health coverage to same-sex partners

The University of Alabama at Birmingham will extend health insurance benefits to same-sex partners beginning Jan. 1 in a move officials said was designed in part to help it compete with top medical schools when recruiting faculty.

Faculty and staff were able to enroll same-sex partners and their children in medical, dental and vision plans for the first time earlier this month, for coverage beginning in the new year. The move makes UAB the first of the big three universities in Alabama to offer domestic partner benefits to staff and faculty. Neither the University of Alabama nor Auburn University offer such benefits, though UA is studying the issue, spokespersons for those schools said.

Dale Turnbough, a UAB spokeswoman, said the change was made “to create a positive, supportive and diverse work environment,” and to help the school compete for new faculty with other National Institute of Health-funded medical schools. Most top medical schools, including Vanderbilt, Duke and Johns Hopkins offer such benefits, she said.

“We believe this change will help us remain competitive,” she said.

The expansion of benefits to domestic partners comes several months after the release of a UAB film student’s documentary about the impact of the lack of benefits on the university. In the film “One Closed Door After Another” UAB faculty members and employees said the school was losing top talent, or not getting the opportunity to seriously recruit top talent, because competing schools offered same-sex partners health coverage. They also discussed how the lack of coverage for their partners affected their own lives.Efforts to reach the film’s director, Jade Delisle, for comment Wednesday were not successful, but she told the UAB student newspaper Kaleidoscope that UAB was among just a handful of top research universities not offering domestic partner benefits.

“A lot of people left for this reason,” she told the newspaper. The short film, which is posted on the Web site YouTube, was not a factor in the university’s decision to extend its benefits, Turnbough said.

Growing trend

Gay and lesbian rights advocates said that the number of academic institutions and businesses offering same-sex partner benefits nationally has been slowly increasing for years.

Trevor Thomas, a spokesman for the nonprofit Human Rights Campaign, said a recent survey by the organization found that 74 of the 130 universities on the U.S. News & World Report list of top schools offered the benefits as of Jan. 1 of this year.

The percentage of top colleges and universities offering benefits to domestic partners has declined slightly compared to a survey done in 2007, probably because of a shuffling in the U.S. News rankings, and not because any universities have stopped offering the benefits, he said.

According to the Human Rights Campaign survey, a similar percentage of Fortune 500 businesses offer domestic partner benefits. Typically, larger businesses are more likely to offer such benefits than smaller ones. Eighty-three percent of Fortune 100 companies offer domestic partner benefits, compared to 57 percent of Fortune 500 companies.