Source: https://familylaw.typepad.com/virginiafamilylawappeals/insurance/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 02:35:24+00:00

Document:
The Court of Appeals interprets an agreement to pay non-covered medical expenses as lasting as long as the child is eligible for the father's health insurance, given the wording of the agreement and its lack of anything saying otherwise, and dismisses other challenges to enforcement through contempt of court. Green v. Robertson, unpublished 3/20/18.
The Husband [father] agrees to maintain the minor children as a beneficiary of his present medical/hospitalization policy for so long as they may be entitled to said coverage. The parties agree to share equally the cost of any medical or dental expenses (including orthodontic) of the children not covered by said insurance.
The mother brought a contempt case and also sued for breach of contract, to which the father countered with the widely-feared but little used concept of "merger", borrowed from real estate law -- the idea that the agreement was entirely swallowed up by the divorce decree and no longer exists. The mother nonsuited the breach claim, and her counsel admitted in court that it was "merged", so the Court of Appeals does not get to address that concept.
The word minor is not limiting in this context ... It is descriptive. It describes the children who are the subject of this provision. The children who at the time in the execution of the agreement were minors, that word, in its common sense reading, does not limit their entitlement only to the minority, but again simply is descriptive of who we are talking about. The kids were minor [sic] at the time of this agreement. This child being a minor at the time of this agreement, he is still now entitled and is apparently covered by insurance.
The trial court found that the obligation to provide insurance was still in force because the child in question still qualified for it, and that the non-covered costs obligation lasted as long as the obligation to provide insurance, but declined to find the father in willful contempt, or to award attorney's fees, because the father's interpretation was reasonable, though mistaken. But it ordered the father to pay half of some considerable bills for very serious medical problems.
We find the distinction between the title of these two motions an inconsequential matter of form. Mother’s affidavit and petition for rule to show cause recited the relevant facts required for the trial court to award her relief ... Most importantly, mother’s affidavit and petition for rule to show cause also specifically requested the relief ultimately granted by the trial court. ... Trial courts have the discretion to enforce decrees based on the filing of a show cause motion, even where no contempt is found.
Also, the agreement's incorporation made it generally enforceable as part of the divorce decree, and also made it a judgment, and the mother's motion sought to have the already-owed part of that judgment restated as a particular dollar amount.
Father raised several issues of interpretation. One was that the agreement was made long before the Affordable Care Act let children stay on their parents' insurance for several more years. But that does not change the "plain meaning" of “for so long as they may be entitled to said coverage”, the Court replies.
... the agreement specifically contemplated that the time period for which the children may be provided coverage was subject to change, and it was purposefully drafted to extend father’s obligation to cover that shifting time frame. The agreement did not set a finite end date for the father’s obligation. ... Use of the word “may” suggests that the parties anticipated that the amount of time for which the children would be entitled to coverage would be subject to change and that father’s obligation to provide coverage was subject to those potential changes.
As for the "minor children" wording discussed above, the Court adds that it would make the “for so long as they may be entitled to said coverage” wording "virtually meaningless" surplusage. It also notes that elsewhere in the agreement, the "minor children" are to remain life insurance beneficiaries until age 22, and to have college paid for.
And "entitled to said coverage", in the context of adult children on parents' health insurance, plainly means "qualified", not "entitled" in some stronger and narrower legal sense. And because there is not any other sense in which any child would be "entitled" to health insurance, to require such a non-existent entitlement would make the whole provision meaningless.
The reference to “said insurance” refers to the insurance discussed in the prior sentence ... and limits the obligation of the parties to pay for uncovered expenses to the period of time when the children had insurance coverage, regardless of their age.
So if the insurance were no longer available to cover them, the non-covered costs obligation would expire with it; but here, the insurance and the obligation were still in effect.
Court can order custodial father to pay net of alimony minus child support; can make decisions code requires though not discussed at trial.
A support order can offset the payments for one kind of support against payments going the opposite way for another kind of support, the Court of Appeals says in O'Reilly v. O'Reilly (5/31/16), unpublished. Thus, when ordering a father to pay alimony to the mother, and the mother to pay child support to him, a court can order him to pay the net difference rather than having money going in both directions.
Nor was it error for a judge to order children's non-covered medical expenses shared in proportion to income, even though there was no discussion of that during the trial. All support orders are required to address this by Code Section 20–108.2 D, and the order followed the by-default formula for doing so.
The mother believed, as some parents do after looking at the support guideline spreadsheets, that the father was supposed to pay her the amount listed as "father's obligation" even though he was the custodial parent. The Court disagreed, and said that that amount is what he's assumed, but not ordered, to spend on the children from his own income, in addition to the child support the mother pays him.
The federal Fourth Circuit court of appeals has reversed a trial court ruling that had said the University's insurance company should have defended it against a civil suit for the role its employee played in the international child abduction in the Miller-Jenkins case between Vermont and Virginia. A Vermont lesbian couple broke up and the partner who was the child's natural mother took her to Virginia and claimed that since Virginia would not recognize the couple's Civil Union under its Defense of Marriage Act, it should not recognize the other woman's parenthood and should not enforce a role for her in the child's life. This argument failed, going all the way to the Virginia Supreme Court, and a network of Christians who conscientiously objected to the state having the power to make a non-parent a parent (at least in a gay relationship) helped the mother flee to Nicaragua with the child.
"Critically, unlike the underlying complaints considered in the cases cited by the district court, the Jenkins Complaint does not allege that Appellee was responsible for its agents’ intentional acts because it was negligent. Rather, the Jenkins Complaint alleges that Appellee is directly liable for harm arising from its intentional participation in conspiracies and vicariously liable for the intentional acts of its agents."
In particular, the Jenkins Complaint charges that Miller retained the dean of Liberty University School of Law, Mathew Staver, and one of the school’s professors, Rena Lindevaldsen, as her attorneys. As alleged, Staver and Lindevaldsen encouraged and assisted Miller in violating state court orders, established social media forums soliciting donations to groups that aimed to “prevent court ordered contact” between Jenkins and her daughter, and planned with other co-conspirators to kidnap the child.
So, in several respects, the underlying lawsuit was a blatantly unconstitutional, Un-American "SLAPP" suit -- a "Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation." But it is hard to distinctly say that it actually stands on its own as such a suit, because it also includes what sound like very legitimate claims that should have been redressed: the same people named in the lawsuit for their academic work, and legal and political advocacy, were also alleged to have done very concrete things, which they should have known were illegal, to help the mother sneak the child out of the country to prevent the other mother from visiting with her. Even though they honestly believe that the other mother is not a real mother, had no rights, and that the government violates parents' rights, and gains dangerous and unprecedented power, when it decrees that a non-parent is a parent and that the biological father is not a parent (except in cases where it is required by the child's needs because of child abuse or neglect).
The suit against the University was dismissed, but the immediate effect of this ruling is that the insurance company will not have to reimburse the University for its legal fees and costs in that suit.
LIBERTY UNIVERSITY, INC., v. CITIZENS INSURANCE COMPANY OF AMERICA; HANOVER AMERICAN INSURANCE COMPANY; HANOVER INSURANCE COMPANY, published, U.S. Fourth Circuit, Case No. 14-2254 (July 10, 2015).
US law pre-empts state law changing beneficiaries at divorce - Va.Sup.Ct.
SPOUSAL DEATH BENEFIT STATUTE CHANGING BENEFICIARY UPON DIVORCE – FEGLI – FEDERAL PREEMPTION. Contrary to the rulings of a majority of state courts, the Virginia Supreme Court held in Maretta v. Hillman, ___ Va. App. ___, ___ S.E.2d ___, 26 VLW 58 (1/13/12) that yes, Virginia, the federal statutory law that awards even a divorced widow, even in our Commonwealth, the late husband’s Federal Employees’ Group Life Insurance (FEGLI), overrides Va. Code §20-111.1(D), denies those benefits to a new wife and now widow, and does not require the payback to the new spouse that §20-111.1(D) would otherwise dictate. After all, the majority said, the FEGLI statute, 5 U.S.C. §8701 et seq. has a provision, §8709(d)(1), which expressly preempts state legislation to the contrary, and a definite scheme of priorities for the award of the benefits under §8705(a). The opinion also states that the Virginia Supreme Court is well aware that it is taking the minority position among states. Justices McClanahan and Millette dissent, holding that the federal statute cannot preempt the payback provision of Virginia Code §111.1(B), which has itself wording that says that it operates when there has been a federal preemption. The majority thinking was that allowing the payback requirement would directly frustrate the intent of Congress, but the dissenters believe that Virginia is free to create an equitable claim for compensation under its domestic relations laws, which, after all, have always been regarded as matters of state law.

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