Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage by Nancy D. Polikoff

Author:Nancy D. Polikoff [Polikoff, Nancy D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4434-6
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2008-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Domestic Partner Benefits for All Families

As an employee of the state of Maryland, Jo cannot enroll her partner, Takia, or Takia’s children, in the state health plan. Until recently, Takia was working part-time, and so she and the children were forced to go without insurance. During that time the couple struggled to afford medical care for their son’s asthma. Now that Takia is a full-time employee, she and her children are covered, but the insurance is inferior to the coverage Jo receives from the state.1

In 1999, Vega left her job to move with Mala to Olympia, Washington. She was uninsured during the five months that she was unemployed, and she could not be insured through Mala because they were not married.2

Marriage is not the solution to the problem these couples describe. The solution is universal access to healthcare. All of the 45 million uninsured people in the United States3—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and heterosexual—should have healthcare. The number of uninsured and the cost of healthcare and health insurance premiums have skyrocketed in the past fifteen years. Medical expenses trigger more than half of all personal bankruptcies. A job lucrative enough to provide health insurance, or partnership/marriage to someone with such a job, should not be a prerequisite to obtaining health care.

In the absence of a national healthcare program in the United States, however, access for all but the very poor, who are covered by Medicaid, and those over sixty-five, who are covered by Medicare, depends primarily on benefits provided to employees and their families. Today, 80 percent of people who are not elderly and who have health insurance receive that coverage through their job or through the job of a family member.4 Defining what family members should be eligible requires assessing the purpose of this type of program.

The Job-Insurance Connection

Coming out of the Depression, during World War II, government imposed wage and price controls to avoid inflation. Pressure from unions to raise workers’ standard of living resulted in government rulings that allowed employers to offer employee benefits instead of wage increases, along with favorable tax treatment of such benefits.5

After World War II, employee health and welfare benefits increased. European countries developed policies to serve the health needs of all. The United States instead fostered a system connected to employment and amended federal tax laws to subsidize the practice. This favorable tax treatment remains today; an employer can deduct the costs of benefits from its taxable earnings, and the value of the benefits, unlike wages, is not taxable to employees. (For the moment this is not true of benefits to unmarried partners.)

Like that of many laws and policies that distinguish between married couples and everyone else, the history of benefits as part of a compensation package includes assumptions that date back to the sex-specific roles of women and men. The “family wage” concept, developed in the nineteenth century, assumed that a man needed to earn enough money to support himself, his wife, and his children. A working woman was assumed to have either another source of income—her father or husband—or no dependents or both.

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