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The purpose of this chapter is to tell you about the most common arguments against domestic partnership policies, and the best answers to them.
By far, the most common argument made against every domestic partnership plan is that it will be expensive. With pure registration policies, this is simply nonsense. The only cost associated with them is a bit of paper pushing. Nonetheless, since cost has become such a potent political argument, consider getting rid of it altogether by making the registration system self-sufficient. Have the policy set the fee so that it covers the costs. If you are setting up a registration for a government which also issues marriage licenses, be wary of setting the same fee for both.
With many recognition systems, such as jail and hospital visitation plans, there simply is no expense at all. With some others, like bereavement leave, the cost is both small and equal to that for other relationships often far less close (funeral leave plans for example often cover in-laws).
With good illustrations of how cruel the failure to recognize nonmarital relationships can be, these minor cost arguments are usually not very convincing. If cost is a real hot button issue, consider restricting the policy to true no cost items and making the issue go away.
It will cost money to add domestic partners to valuable benefit plans, like health plans and "free ride" pension benefits. The kind of additional cost is very important to responding to objections based on cost.
If domestic partners were to use the benefits to the same extent that spouses do, each domestic partner would cost the same as each spouse. The additional cost is the per person equal additional cost which comes from letting more people participate in the plan.
The best answer to objections based on this kind of cost is that the cost will increase because it has been artificially kept down by excluding nonmarital partners. Suggest that you could control cost just as well by refusing to allow any new spouses to be added to the plan. Most people will say that would be unfair, with employment benefits, a violation of equal pay for equal work.
There is a second type of cost which could pose more difficulty. If domestic partners used the benefit more than spouses did, they would cost more per person and would drive up the costs of the plan by more than an equal to spouses per person amount. With benefit plans, this kind of cost is usually referred to as "adverse selection." It simply means the group you are bringing in uses the benefit more, so costs more to cover. Most "adverse selection" cost arguments are based on the implicit claim that domestic partners are sicker than spouses (AIDS is usually the unstated premise here) or are more likely to "cheat" and use the benefit to cover not partners but people who are ill and in need of coverage. The best answer to this argument is that we have considerable data which shows that it simply is not true. A number of cities and business have added domestic partners to health plans, they have not used the benefit more than others and costs have not gone up because of them.
Contact an institution similar to yours with an existing plan to back up your answer. If you don't know of one, contact one of the national LGBT organizations for a referral. There aren't any studies about why domestic partners cost the same as spouses. People who work with the plans note that AIDS actually is far from the most expensive disease and suggest that domestic partners have fewer prohibitively expensive childbirths and heart and lung cases.
As for cheating, domestic partners seem as honest as anyone else.
Domestic partnership plans have the potential to create one type of adverse selection that has nothing to do with cheating or illness rates. Occasionally, health insurers will try to negotiate for a domestic partner's surcharge, a perhaps temporary increase in rates to give them a cushion against the possibility that domestic partners will cost more.
These were difficult to oppose when domestic partnership was new and no precedent existed, but there is no reason to accept them now that there is considerable evidence that domestic partners don't cost more. See 4.3 Proving the Case: Cost Evidence.
If your employer does accept a surcharge, and if employees pay all or a part of the cost of covering their spouses and partners, insist that the surcharge be added equally to the cost of all employees, not just those adding domestic partners. Here's why: domestic partnership will be artificially made more expensive that coverage for spouses by the surcharge. Because the cost for domestic partners will be higher, some may not decide to take it. Those who are healthy are more likely to do that than those who are not. So a higher proportion of domestic partners who are signed up could be people who already have health problems. If that happens, it really will be more expensive to cover domestic partners. The surcharge, in other words, may create an "adverse selection" if only employees signing up are domestic partners who have to pay for it. See 2.3 Deciding What Kind: Ways in Which Health and Free-Ride Pension Plans Affect Proposals.
This is the favorite rallying cry of opponents. Marriage has two kinds of "benefits." It has intangible social benefits: the respect people and institutions pay to, and the positive assumptions they make about people who are married (for example, that they are stable, loving, take care of each other, etc.). Again, it may be tempting to argue that domestic partnerships deserve those same intangible benefits. But the fact is that giving a relationship a label and slight legal rights does not give it all the respect society gives marriage
This argument is more with the second type of marriage benefit, that of tangible benefits and legal rights. Most of these are created by state and federal governments. They include the right to inherit if your spouse doesn't have a will; the right to make medical and other decisions for a disabled spouse; deductions from inheritance taxes if a spouse dies; property tax breaks if a spouse dies, continuing social security pensions, etc. Virtually none of these "benefits" are covered by most domestic partnership policies. Some of the "default" systems -- things like inheritance and medical decisions -- probably should include domestic partners. Be up front if that is your long-term goal. But the many state and federal benefits of marriage are tied to marriage. Local domestic partnership policies won't ever change that.
Legally, marriage has two kinds of obligations. First, married people are obligated to provide basic support to each other. In most states, this means that if one spouse can't provide for his or her own basic needs, the other has to do it. Basic needs usually includes food, shelter, clothing, medical care. It usually requires support at the level the couple has lived at if possible.
The obligations of domestic partnership depend on what your proposal says. In a pure registration system that isn't designed to be used for benefit plans, there may be no obligations. You can explain that by saying there aren't any rights either. More typical systems will include a basic general support obligation somewhat more limited than the one which goes with marriage. The idea is that the system is supposed to be set up for committed couples, hence the obligation, but that it seemed unfair to attach extensive legal obligations to a relationship which carries few or no legal benefits.
This argument is particularly effective if the obligations increase when the relationship is recognized, as with plans where the partners are responsible for each other's medical expenses if they get covered on each other's medical plans.
A few plans have the same obligations. While this is problematic, it allows you to say that domestic partnership has all of the obligations and few or none of the benefits.
The second obligation is "marital property," which isn't really an obligation at all. In most states, married people have a legal right to share in each other's earnings. Since the obligation to share comes with a right to share, "marital property" or "community property" is really an even swap or rights and obligations. Although domestic partnership plans could have similar rights, most states have differing rules (as in marital property) duplicating this would greatly duplicate your proposal; just referring to them won't really tell people who sign what they are getting into.
This critique typically comes from people who favor nonmarital relationships. It comes closer to the truth, especially on the benefits side, as domestic partnership has few of the tangible or intangible benefits of marriage.
The question of obligations is determined by how you define domestic partnership. The most important thing you can do is simply be clear about what the obligations are and how they compare to marriage.
Sometimes this argument comes from advocates for persons with AIDS or other serious disabilities, who worry about the affect domestic partnership will have on benefit eligibility. Some government benefit plans -- SSI, some Medicaid and some food stamps -- make eligibility depend on your income. Many of those plans assume that a spouse's income above a certain base amount is available to you, and include it in figuring your income to decide on eligibility or benefits ("imputed income").
You may need to consult an expert, but generally speaking, all federal programs only impute the income of "spouses," and define as "spouses" those who are married under state law. Domestic partnership is not considered a marriage.
Occasionally opponents will seize on the fact that domestic partnership is not likely to be a disqualifying factor in benefit programs as further evidence of the "all the benefits, none of the obligations" argument. The answer to this is that most of these programs have benefits for marriage as well; Social Security continues pensions for spouses, Medicaid lets one spouse keep a jointly owned home even though the other is getting benefits on the basis of poverty. Domestic partners don't get these benefits.
There are two related, very strange, ideas here. The first is that if society recognizes any form of relationship other than marriage, that marriage will collapse. For example, the person responsible for blocking San Francisco's first domestic partnership plan told a stunned group of LGBT supporters that if it took effect, women would no longer be able to get men to marry them.
Probably all you need to do to answer this is to point out the faulty assumption; people get married because of its legal consequences. Add to that the fact that even if they did, something with as little to offer as domestic partnership would be unlikely to draw many away. Opponents who make this argument probably have less faith in marriage than most people.
The other idea is that recognizing the existence of any other form of relationship somehow demeans marriage. The idea seems to be that personal commitment and love are characteristic of marriage and that admitting that they exist outside of it makes marriage less special.
The best answer to this argument is to point out again that committed relationships exist outside of marriage, and that the failure to recognize them can be tragic. Recognizing the dignity of one relationship does not demean the dignity of another.
With valuable benefit plans, opponents occasionally argue that the cost should be spent on additional benefits for all employees rather than for the small group of employees with domestic partners. For example, when adding domestic partners to San Francisco's health plan was proposed, the system's actuaries proposed a new vision plan instead. The virtue of the plan, the actuaries said, was that it would benefit all employees.
The answer to this is to go back to the equal pay for equal work argument. The point of the domestic partnership proposal is not to give a new special benefit to some, but to equalize the pay of employees who've long been excluded from an important benefit.
>> Next: 6. Writing Policies -- The Relationship
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