Longtime Companion

My boyfriend is thirty and self-employed, as the saying goes, and he's not had health insurance since he was in college, but when the shitty health care bill passed, we figured it was better to put him on my very good and very reasonable employer-backed plan than find ourselves in a few years time saddled with some piece-of-shit, overpriced, high-deductible mandate. This led to an hilarious flurry of activity. We had to keep ourselves from giggling at the bank as we forced ourselves to call each other "domestic partners," and I nearly died when, after I called the auto insurance to have his name added beside the "additional driver in household" line, I got a form back listing his "relationship to primary policy-holder" simply as "friend," which is what my grandmother calls him. This was all to prove to an insurance broker that we are, in fact, "domestic partners," even though we are not, in fact, domestic partners. We are boyfriends, infantile though that term may be. For tax reasons and personal reasons and also simply because we are both hopeless procrastinaters, we never merged bank accounts or got joint, well, anything. It's actually a little disconcerting to find that our mutual-consensual householding is now something slightly less than instantly disolvable at-will by either party. It offends our sensibilities, but oh well, it's a relatively slim price for good dental.

Did we jump the gun? Of course, I said back when it passed that a government mandate that its subjects purchase the product of a private company or else the government will punish and penalize you was absurd, a forcible wealth-transfer scheme whereby we are all dragooned into a plot to subsidize the operating margins of private firms. Henry E. Hudson, I salute you. I doubt it will last; I can't imagine the Roberts court overturning such a delicious corporate subsidy. But a boy can dream, cain't he?