Tuesday, November 10, 2009

What else was in the awful health care bill passed by US House? Family redefinition provisions for one.

The approximately 2,000 page health care bill passed by the US House under the cover of dark last Saturday evening continues to be reviewed for all the bad stuff it contained. Dramatic expansion of government control and regulation of our nation's health care system is the most obvious, but not surprisingly there were a lot of other left wing social agenda items included. Among them family redefinition provisions.

These were highlighted in a story posted on the left newsblog Minnesota Independent.

They correctly conclude that the focus of pro-life and social conservatives was the battle over abortion coverage mandates in the bill. But then go on to point out a number of provisions slipped in by homosexual activists "unnoticed".

While abortion politics dominated conservative opposition to the health care reform package that barely passed the U.S. House on Saturday evening, several measures in the bill that are beneficial to LGBT Americans largely went unnoticed — especially by conservatives.

The Human Rights Campaign reports it successfully lobbied to get five provisions important to the LGBT community included in the final bill.

Currently, the government doesn’t track health disparities based on sexual orientation and gender identity like it does for race, economic status, marital status, age and a number of other characteristics. The bill that passed the House would add those categories to the government’s data collection practices and would for the first time be able to determine health disparities. That would enable the government to direct funding for research and public health efforts to address those disparities. A similar bill has been offered in Congress, the Ending Health Disparities for LGBT Americans Act.

The House bill also contains language from the Tax Equity for Health Plan Beneficiaries Act. Employer-paid health benefits for a domestic partner are taxed by the federal government as income but benefits for spouses are not. That means same-sex couples that utilize their employers’ health plan pay income taxes that married couples do not. The bill that passed the House on Saturday would fix that inequity.

An important disparity in the treatment of HIV is remedied in the bill. In order for people living with HIV to qualify for Medicaid programs they must have a diagnosis of AIDS — which often comes after years of living with the disease. The new legislation would enable states to qualify individuals who are newly diagnosed with HIV disease for Medicaid programs. That policy is included in the bill as the Early Treatment for HIV Act.

Strong protections to prevent discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in health insurance and in the health care system also made it into the House bill.

Finally, the bill provides funding for comprehensive sex education programs that include relevant information for LGBT students.

The provisions show homosexual activists are once again turning to government as a vehicle for indoctrinating young students.

They point out the attention of many social conservative groups was on the mandating of abortion coverage and justifiably so. Stopping efforts which would have codified the power of the state and use of our taxpayer dollars to kill, eventually, millions of unborn children, was of supreme importance.

That, however, doesn't negate the significance of many of provisions which seek to redefine and thus undermine the basic structure of the natural family. This is, of course, where homosexual activists ultimately want to go.

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