Commentary: Welcome to the Age of the "Insurance Card Marriage"

Link: The Huffington Post
by Terrance Heath

Excerpt:

Forget green cards. A growing number of Americans are getting hitched to get health insurance.

Some people marry for love, some for companionship, and others for status or money. Now comes another reason to get hitched: health insurance.

In a poll released today, 7% of Americans said they or someone in their household decided to marry in the last year so they could get healthcare benefits via their spouse.

"It's a small number but a powerful result, because it shows how paying for healthcare is reflected not only in family budgets but in life decisions," said Drew E. Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which commissioned the survey as part of its regular polling on healthcare.

...What surprised researchers was that such costs had become a factor in marriage decisions. "We should have asked about divorce," said Altman, joking.

Those who cited health insurance as a factor in deciding to marry tended to have modest incomes. About 6 in 10 were in households making less than $50,000 a year, said Mollyann Brodie, who directs Kaiser's opinion research. They also were younger, with 4 in 10 between 18 and 34.

Maybe they should have asked about divorce. They'd have found that at least some people stay married for the sake of health insurance.

Whether people get married or stay married for the sake of health insurance, who can blame them?

[...]

A while back, I asked "Is Health Care a Gay Issue?", and at the risk of repeating myself, it becomes one at the point where health insurance is linked to marital status, or at least it should.

And now, the Michigan Supreme Court ruling only underscores the importance.

Local governments and state universities in Michigan can't offer health insurance to the partners of gay workers, the state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

The court ruled 5-2 that Michigan's 2004 ban against gay marriage also blocks domestic-partner policies affecting gay employees at the University of Michigan and other public-sector employers.

The decision affirms a February 2007 appeals court ruling.

Up to 20 public universities, community colleges, school districts and local governments in Michigan have benefit policies covering at least 375 gay couples. After the appeals court ruled, universities and local governments rewrote their policies to try to comply with the gay marriage ban -- so the effect of Wednesday's decision is unclear.

The new policies no longer specifically acknowledge domestic partnerships but make sure "other qualified adults," including gay partners, are eligible for medical and dental care. The adults have to live together for a certain amount of time, be unmarried, share finances and be unrelated.

The volley of lawsuits is likely to continue, since the Michigan law is one of those that easily be read as prohibiting the official recognition of "similar unions" as well as awarding benefits to those "similar unions." (Essentially, same-sex couples could get around this by creating some form of relationship that bears not so much as a passing resemblance to marriage.) In the meantime, there are a lot more same-sex couples in Michigan with one partner who just lost his/her health insurance. Not that they can't get health insurance for their partners. They'll just pay more for it than the married heterosexual couple next door. That's all.

[...]

Health care has cropped up in national political debate again, as Sen. John McCain debuted his health care plan, and the conventional wisdom is that the McCain plan would raise health care costs and generally and already bad system worse. Bill Scher has posted a great blog round-up that includes my favorite assesment of the McCain plan: "Oliver Willis and Masson's Blog sum up what McCain's plan means for you in one word: Pray."

You can bet that if it would make things worse for heterosexual couples, it would do our families even less good.

The Democratic presidential contenders, on the other hand, have plans that pretty much resemble the Health Care for America plan.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards have been sniping at each other for months over healthcare, but there's one thing the top Democratic presidential candidates agree on: Americans of all ages should have the choice of buying a government-run plan modeled on Medicare.

The idea, which would set up a competition between a new government plan and private insurance programs, has been overshadowed by the political horse race. But it's one of the most far-reaching and controversial proposals for making health insurance more affordable and more widely available.

The government now guarantees access to healthcare only for seniors and the disabled through Medicare and for the poor mainly through Medicaid. Under the proposals being advanced by Clinton, Obama and Edwards, the government would offer coverage for middle-class workers and their families, with benefits comparable to those now provided for federal employees and members of Congress.

Participation in the government plan would be voluntary, but the approach sparks widely differing reactions.

Equality, for our families is and may continue to be hard to come by much of the time, and hard won where it does exist, while we are in the process of building our lives and our families together; weaving our families' destinies together with those of our community and our country, much as we weave our own together as families. We can walk down the aisle just like any other couples, but may continue for some time walk back up the aisle with fewer benefits and protections than other couples.

But neither we nor they should need to walk down the aisle for the sake of having health insurance. Health Care for All isn't a "gay health bill," and it doesn't single out particular groups for inclusion or exclusion. It does, however, offer a way to provide all Americans with health insurance, married or not. It would treat my family the same as the family down the street, with two legally married parents, because its benefits are not conditional on the basis our marital status or anyone else's. We'd get them whether we're married or not, and whether we can marry or not.

Well, that's a kind of equality, and one that appears to be good for everybody.

Or, to put it another way, for all.

[jw]