SB5, and a great letter to the editor

Well, the Kentucky Senate did it again. They overwhelmingly passed hateful SB5 today by a vote of 28 to 6. SB5 would ban state universities from offering their equal healthcare coverage. However, there were some great moments today… like when Senator Scorsone had the following to say regarding the Senate having the authority to act on the pieces they did today, "We should not debate this issue or any other measure," he said. "Look at the other end of the Capitol, the lights are off. They've gone home and we should as well." Shortly to follow, Senator Carroll (while being against dp benefits) spoke about Governor Fletcher playing politics saying it was “Fletcher's own appointed university trustees who voted in favor of the domestic partner benefits.” He asked whether the governor had called any university board members and said, "Look, what you're doing is against my personal conviction and I ask you not to do it?" Fletcher's decision to add the bill to the call "reflects a political position he hasn't taken leadership on." Nice job to both these Senators and the other four that voted against SB5 today. The last piece of great news is this letter to the editor in the Herald Leader today by Representative Tom Burch of Louisville.

~Jody

UK benefits plan no threat to marriage
Opponents of the University of Kentucky's new benefits plan argue that making health insurance accessible to domestic partners is harmful to the common good -- that is, an employer who provides an employee and a sponsored dependent with the same health insurance benefits as married-couple families somehow contributes to devaluing marriage.

Many factors have contributed to the increase in the divorce rate, the higher rate of single-person households and the rise in the rate of single-parent households. However, providing health insurance benefits has never been cited as one those factors.

In fact, it could be easily argued that the provision of health insurance benefits by employers is extremely helpful to the common good. Better health care and more access to health care for more people is a good thing.

Furthermore, even though studies show that marriage is correlated with many positive characteristics, it does not necessarily follow that if everyone is married, all the negatives sometimes associated with divorce and single parenthood would disappear. Staying in a violent or destructive marriage or marrying for the wrong reasons are likely to be highly correlated with negative consequences.

Additionally, a combination of economic and demographic changes in the United States has made the traditional, "ideal" family household a less-frequent occurrence. The proportion of married-couple households with their own children declined from 40 percent of all households in 1970 to 28 percent in 2006.

The number of families whose head of household was living with children or other relatives but had no spouse present increased from 11 percent of households in 1970 to 17 percent in 2006. An even greater change has been the increase in the proportion of one-person households: up 9 percentage points between 1970 and 2006, from 17 percent to 27 percent.

The bottom line is that there is a much greater diversity in household arrangements than in the past and that the provision of health care in our society needs to change to reflect that reality.