First of all, if you haven’t read the posts from all the nominees for this year’s Best Blog Hope Award, here’s the link.
Be sure to vote for your favorite as the voting ends at the end of the month. The lucky winner gets tickets to this years Night Of Hope event in New York City!!
As the website continues to be updated into some high security system, I am finding times when I can’t access it all. So here is yesterday’s post in case you missed it on Facebook. My draft for phone calls to representatives speaking to the need for support of the Family Act of 2011. Here goes:
I have worked in the mortgage finance industry now for 20 years as I have watched congressional representatives passionately defend the mortgage interest tax deduction.
Designed to provide some financial benefit to homeownership it has survived relentless attacks arguing against its merits.
Year after year homeowners enjoy the benefits of this write off to make home ownership more affordable for their families.
Let’s talk a little about those families.
This year millions of men and women will attempt to fill the rooms of those houses with children.
Sadly millions of couples will learn that they are infertile.
Perhaps it’s because many of them waited too long to make sure they were financially ready. Or finished school and worked to a certain place in their career when they began hearing the ticking of their biological clocks.
Many of them are unpleasantly surprised to learn that insurance will not cover medical infertility treatments.
At first maybe they can swing the cost of the entry level treatments.
A thousand here. A few thousand there.
It’s when it hits the tens of thousands that the burden really hits.
There is a bill that you could support today that would ease that burden.
The Family Act of 2011.
This bill gets to the heart of ‘family interest’.
Namely the interest in growing one with the help of infertility doctors.
For many men and women diagnosed with the disability of infertility the cost is more than they can afford.
The Family Act would ease this burden. Give them a fighting chance to fill at least one room in that house with a room full of baby stuff followed by toddler stuff and on and on until high school or college.
A lifetime of memories could fill that house for the lifetime cost an IVF at a high end clinic.
This comes at a much lower cost to tax revenue than the mortgage interest deduction.
And it provides a potential lifetime of return on investment.
I know. I am the father of an IVF baby born 10 years ago.
Back then the push was to see health insurance coverage for infertility.
Except for a handful of states that never became a reality.
That’s why it is time that this one time lifetime tax credit is passed once and for all.
I hope that you will support the Family Act of 2011 today, in the interest of promoting “family interests” as heartily as Congress has protected the annual mortgage interest tax deduction.