Michael Steele Goes Negative on Family Benefits

It really takes some doing to simultaneously miss the point of both health care and marriage equality, but the Michael Steele era at the RNC is up for the task.  The chair of the party’s latest came in what we can only presume is an unpremeditated burst of cluelessness is attempting to use the employer-based health care system as a youth-friendly talking point to explain conservative opposition to same-sex marriage.  In doing so, he goes negative on family benefits with your job – the cornerstone of coverage that most of us rely on.

Let’s go right to Michael Steele’s comments in Georgia.  He was talking about the need for the G.O.P. to alter its language about gay marriage to appeal to more young people.  So let’s be clear, this isn’t changing the policy at all – it’s just coming up with a new way to dress up the same opposition, Frank Luntz-style.  However, it’s doubtful Frank Luntz or anyone with a modicum of communications or messaging skill would have advised Steele to go with this humdinger:  “Now all of a sudden I've got someone who wasn't a spouse before, that I had no responsibility for, who is now getting claimed as a spouse that I now have financial responsibility for.  So how do I pay for that? Who pays for that? You just cost me money.”

I see what you’re saying, yes. Actually, wait, no I don’t.  Employers suddenly having a financial responsibility for members of the employees’ family is the bedrock of our current health care system, for well or for ill.  What Steele describes – “all of a sudden” getting a new beneficiary that wasn’t on the plan before – is something so familiar to most employers due to life events like marriage, births, or adoptions that it barely scratches the surface.  Is Steele suggesting employers would have a right to insure only the actual employee, or demand that someone else or the government pays for the additional cost for a family plan?  Is this real pain being felt by small businesses that they just grin and bear for heterosexual dependents, but would really be under severe financial pain if more dependents were in the mix?  Are family plans one of the major cost drivers for small businesses in dealing with health care?

No, of course not.  Not even the National Federation of Independent Businesses – hardly a progressive trade organization – will tell you dependent care is a big drain on their business.  Instead, it’s the escalation curve of costs, costs and more costs.  In fact, their report on health care policy is entitled “The Rising Costs of Health Care:  Implications for Public Policy.”  Their decidedly right-leaning take on issues of individual responsibility, increasing deductibles, additional employee share of cost, tax cuts, completely privatizing Medicare and various other remedies for the health care system mentions “restricting the number of dependents” exactly zero times.  It says “government subsidies for dependents” exactly zero times.  It mentions dependents at all exactly zero time.  There’s a reason for that – the possibility of an increase in the number of married employees barely registers as a blip in the windstorm of skyrocketing costs for small business.

Call me crazy, but maybe Michael Steele should talk to some small business owners before he improvises on health care to bash same sex marriage.  Clearly, he could even start with the most conservative small business owners.  Better yet, maybe he should just stop trying to be helpful in coming up with completely false "youth-friendly" talking points that suggest the profit margin for a business is more important than love, commitment and basic fairness.

(Photo credit:  ajagendorf25 on Flickr.)