Photo: WDCpix

Photo: WDCpix

While abortion politics dominated conservative opposition to the health care reform package that barely passed the U.S. House on Saturday evening, several measures in the bill that are beneficial to LGBT Americans largely went unnoticed — especially by conservatives.

The Human Rights Campaign reports it successfully lobbied to get five provisions important to the LGBT community included in the final bill.

Currently, the government doesn’t track health disparities based on sexual orientation and gender identity like it does for race, economic status, marital status, age and a number of other characteristics. The bill that passed the House would add those categories to the government’s data collection practices and would for the first time be able to determine health disparities. That would enable the government to direct funding for research and public health efforts to address those disparities. A similar bill has been offered in Congress, the Ending Health Disparities for LGBT Americans Act.

The House bill also contains language from the Tax Equity for Health Plan Beneficiaries Act. Employer-paid health benefits for a domestic partner are taxed by the federal government as income but benefits for spouses are not. That means same-sex couples that utilize their employers’ health plan pay income taxes that married couples do not. The bill that passed the House on Saturday would fix that inequity.

An important disparity in the treatment of HIV is remedied in the bill. In order for people living with HIV to qualify for Medicaid programs they must have a diagnosis of AIDS — which often comes after years of living with the disease. The new legislation would enable states to qualify individuals who are newly diagnosed with HIV disease for Medicaid programs. That policy is included in the bill as the Early Treatment for HIV Act.

Strong protections to prevent discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in health insurance and in the health care system also made it into the House bill.

Finally, the bill provides funding for comprehensive sex education programs that include relevant information for LGBT students.

Many of these policies have drawn fire from the religious right in the past, but recently such groups have been exerting most of their opposition to opposing abortion rights in the health reform bill. And the Stupak Amendment, which aims to ban any federal funding to cover abortion services, dominated the debate over the bill.

For instance, Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth, who railed against the tax equity bill in July, hasn’t mentioned its inclusion in the health bill.

The American Family Association opposed fixing health disparities for LGBT people as early as February, but abandoned that cause to fight against the inclusion of abortion rights in the health reform bill.

And the Family Research Council seems to have completely missed any notice of the LGBT provisions in the bill. The group spent a considerable amount of time and money on opposing abortion in the health reform bill, and FRC president Tony Perkins was even a featured speaker at Rep. Michele Bachmann’s “House Call” event opposing health care reform. He spoke about abortion.

Update: Now Minnesota Family Council is noticing LGBT measures in healthcare bill