Gays to Benefit from Passed Health Care Bill

I'm somewhat amazed that the amendments covering gay benefits were not vehemently opposed by the right. Hopefully they will not be removed during the shake out when the Senate and House bills are finally merged.

Labels and Gay Benefits in Health Bill

By Robert Pear

Lower taxes for gay couples who receive health benefits from employers. Nutrition labeling requirements for snack food sold in vending machines and many restaurants. A new program to teach parents how to interact with their children.

Those are some of the little-noticed provisions in a mammoth health care bill taken up Saturday by the House of Representatives.

The main purpose of the bill is to make health insurance readily available to all Americans. To that end, it would expand Medicaid and provide hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to help moderate-income people buy insurance.

As a high-priority bill for Congressional leaders and President Obama, the legislation has become a vehicle for many other initiatives large and small.

Supporters of gay rights have long been trying to change the tax treatment of health benefits provided by employers to the domestic partners of their employees. In effect, such benefits are now treated as taxable income for the employee, and the employer may owe payroll taxes on their fair-market value.

Under the bill, such benefits would be tax-free, just like health benefits provided to the family of an employee married to a person of the opposite sex.

Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington, who proposed the change, said it would "correct a longstanding injustice, end a blatant inequity in the tax code and help make health care coverage more affordable for more Americans."

Joseph R. Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights advocacy group, said federal tax law had not kept up with changes in the workplace.

"I meet people all the time who are gratified they work for companies that offer domestic partner benefits," he said. "But they pass on the benefits because they cannot afford the taxes that go with the benefits."

M. V. Lee Badgett, a labor economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said employees with domestic partner benefits paid $1,100 a year more in taxes, on average, than married employees with the same coverage.