Feb 02, 2007  |  By: JULIE ENSZNE  | COMMENTS     

End the tax on DP benefitsAS OF JAN. 1, 2007, for the first time in my adult life, I am on someone else’s health insurance. That someone else is the woman with whom I’ve lived for 10 years and to whom I have made a lifetime commitment. Still, it makes me uncomfortable to not be working for my own health insurance.

I’m grateful, however, that she works for one of the larger companies in the United States that offers domestic partner benefits. I’m also pleased that she’s over the rage at the amount of paperwork that she had to complete to “certify” that we are domestic partners when her heterosexual colleagues need only say that they are married.

There are tax consequences to this arrangement, of course. We considered them carefully prior to making this decision. After all, I could have purchased health insurance independently. The benefits that I am provided will be taxed as additional income for her. This will increase our annual tax bill, filed and paid separately, as the IRS doesn’t recognize our co-mingled financial lives.

I’d like to say that extra tax burden is a small price to pay for having good health insurance through a major corporation. It would be, too, if our heterosexual counterparts were taxed in the same ways. In fact, it feels like a privilege to have access to this health insurance and certainly my partner works hard for it.

I CAN’T HELP thinking, however, that health insurance shouldn’t be a privilege. It should be something that is provided to everyone living in the United States as a consequence of being here and contributing in large and small ways to our collective lives.

A few years ago, I visited Australia, an industrialized country with single-payer, government-provided health insurance. Australian residents rave about their health care system. Recently there has been a debate about whether or not the health care system should cover in vitro fertilization (IVF) for lesbian couples. When I feel optimistic, I think about what it would be like to have that debate here in the United States.

Then I watched President Bush’s State of the Union address. He doesn’t want to make health insurance available to everyone. Instead he wants to create a system whereby health insurance is less accessible to more people. President Bush’s plan of giving tax credits to low income people to purchase health insurance, the very same group of people who already pay the least in taxes, is the equivalent of saying, “We really don’t care if you have health insurance or not.” Unfortunately, in the United States today, that also means, “We don’t really care whether you live or die.”

To the middle class, Bush says, “Sure you can have health insurance, but not really good health insurance or we’ll tax you more.” As usual he’s saving all of the good benefits for the rich.

I HOPE THAT the American people recognize this health insurance fraud for what it is and reject it. I’m not necessarily happy with our health care system today and would welcome further reforms, but let’s not make a bad system worse.

If there are going to be changes to health insurance and its tax treatment in this Congress, I hope that the members of the Democratic Party, who always seem to have their hands out to the gay and lesbian community when it is time to raise money for elections, will do something of real value for the gay and lesbian community and remove the federal tax on domestic partner benefits. It’s a small thing that would mean a lot.

Maybe I’m aiming too low and should ask the Democrats to pass a comprehensive, single-payer health insurance plan. That would be great, but in the absence of that, I’d be happy if they would fix the tax on our domestic partner benefits.