Medical deductions article

My medical deductions article, forthcoming in the Tax Law Review, has indeed gone live here.

The abstract goes as follows: 

Recent decades have seen explosive growth in the availability and efficacy of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) – for example, egg extraction and storage, egg donation, intracytoplasmic sperm injection, in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy. ART greatly enhances millions of lives – not least those of the tens of thousands of people (in the United States alone) who owe their own births to it each year – but it can be extremely costly. Moreover, ART is just one current within a broader ocean of potentially transformative but often very costly) technological advances in the provision of healthcare. However welcome the rise of these technologies may be, they present challenges regarding how their provision should be funded, other than by the prospective users themselves.

Taking on a narrow piece of this broader puzzle, this paper concludes that, under the US federal income tax, medical expense deductions for ART expenses should be available in certain situations where the IRS and the courts – possibly reflecting anti-LGBTQ bias – have recently determined otherwise. More importantly, however, it seeks to situate both the ART debate, and that concerning broader advances in healthcare technology, within an analytical framework that may aid fuller and more definitive inquiries by others.