by Laura Conaway

With the news that Congress is considering taxing workers on the value of their health benefits, the rest of the America is wrestling with a proposal that's standard procedure for families like mine.

 

The idea for lawmakers is to find some way to pay for an overhaul of health care. One possible source is to take away the tax exemption workers now get on employee-sponsored health insurance. Let's say your company pays you a salary of $50,000 and spends $6,000 a year on your family health insurance. Under current law, your gross income is still $50,000.

Unless, that is, you're insuring a spouse or partner in a situation where the federal government considers you unmarried. For me, that the case because I'm one half (and not the better half, either) of a same-sex couple. My health insurance and my son's are tax-free. My partner's is added to my salary. At the end of each year, my employer deducts taxes for Social Security and Medicare in a lump sum — resulting in what we call the "short check," the one missing $500 or so. I then owe another $1,000 or so to the IRS, all money that my legally married colleagues never have to pay.

So what's the economic point? On a personal level, I don't like paying the extra taxes, but I guess I'm proof that you can pay them and still enjoy living. More broadly, I think the disparity in treatment says something about just how patchwork our system for dealing with health care has become. It's another symptom of what Scott Horsley calls our "Hummer of health care systems: big, costly and inefficient."