these are not my walls

I need to just vent for a minute about my frustration with the B.C. medicare program, or, as they call it, the Medical Services Plan (MSP).

Now, in B.C. they have a user fee for the MSP. In general, I don't hold with user fees. Flat fees regardless of income result in those who earn less paying a larger proportion of their income for the fees. In other words, the poor are taxed proportionally more. That's just not cool.

But let me speak specifically to the MSP user fee. The monthly premium for a one-person family is $54, and for a 2-person family it's $96, or $1152 a year. If you make less than $16,000 a year for your 'adjusted net income', you can get 100% premium assistance - i.e. the government will pay the premium for you. The percentage of assistance decreases as the income increases, until if you make $24,000 per year or more, you can't get premium assistance.

Granted, this is net income, so they at least allow you to deduct taxes, EI and CPP before they start assessing whether you can get assistance.

There are some additional deductions you get to make. You get to deduct $3000 for every kid. You get to deduct $3000 for every person 65 years and older. You get to deduct up to $3000 for every person with a disability.

However, what you don't get to deduct is tuition payments. Between us, Alex and I have to pay over $10,000 a year in tuition - the vast majority being mine, I admit. But we are not allowed to claim this in assessing our net income, despite the fact that we would be allowed to claim it on our tax return.

In other words, we have to pay premiums based on non-taxable income.

Which is a serious problem, because right now we have to pay full premiums, but if we were allowed to claim our tuition, we would qualify for 100% premium assistance. We're not exactly talking chump change here, folks.

I didn't think this made any sense, so I called a woman at MSP, and she said this was correct. However, she cheerfully told me, because Alex and I are a 2-person family, we qualified for a $3000 deduction on our net income for the purposes of applying for premium assistance.

Somehow this pales in comparison to the $10,000+ we're shelling out for tuition.