Oklahoma Child Support Is Statutory
Video Transcribed: How much of the health insurance premium is attributable to my child? I’m Tulsa Lawyer James Wirth and that is the question we have regarding custody cases and child support in Oklahoma. So as part of the Oklahoma Child Support Guidelines, an obligor, a parent that’s responsible for paying child support, is generally ordered to pay a pro-rata share or percentage of a health insurance premium.
However, the total health insurance and premium are usually different than the amount attributable to the child so how do you determine how much is attributable to the child? And therefore, how much is the amount that you’re going to be paying a percentage of? This is something that we deal with on a regular basis. And if you don’t follow the numbers closely, it might be something that you could get an order where you’re ordered to pay more than you otherwise should.
Because normally we get these total amounts. You get the information from the employer. It says, “The total amount of health insurance is,” for example, “$500 per month,” but if there are adults on that plan, that needs to be excluded. So usually employers have charts that say, “Okay, if it’s just the employee, it’s this amount.
If it’s an employee and another adult, it’s this amount. If it’s a full family, then it’s this amount,” so you want to look at the differences in those policies to find out how much of the total policy is attributable to the adults and then you want to remove that amount so you only have the amount attributable to the kids.
Then sometimes we have multiple kids on that policy. Sometimes there are kids that are involved in this order and then maybe there’d be children if the mother has kids with another parent or the father has kids with another parent that may be not involved in that.
So you want to look at the total number of children that are on that health insurance policy and you want to divide the premium associated with the kids by that amount to determine the amount applied per child.
Then you want to multiply that by the number of kids that are in your applicable order and that is the appropriate health insurance premium for you to determine what your obligation’s going to be based on.
So if you’re ordered to pay say 50% of that, then it’s going to be half of that amount. So there’s a little bit of math involved and it does require documentation from the insurance company. If it’s through your employer, you want to get with your HR rep to get all that information, the same information you’d get when you’re signing up for, where it says, “This amount of this is that amount of that,” to work all of those numbers.
But if you’re dealing with this circumstance a little error, there could cost you a lot more money in the long run if we’re talking about over 18 years so you want to be careful about that. If you need to speak to a Tulsa family law attorney or a Tulsa Child Support Collection Attorney please visit makelaweasy.com
