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ARTICLE
Reforming the Medical Expense Income Tax Deduction to Better Reflect Crip Time1
Diane Kemker, J.D., LL.M.2
INTRODUCTION
Extraordinary medical expenses- whether due to a one-time occurrence or a chronic
condition- happen on their own time. These expenses, their causes, and their consequences
(medical, personal, financial, or all of these) can rarely be neatly cabined into a single calendar
year. Treatment requiring an expensive prescription medication or complex surgery not covered
by insurance may address a condition that arose over years. That condition may have interfered
with a taxpayer's ability to work in prior years, the current year, and perhaps for years to come,
even for the rest of the taxpayer's earning life. The medical condition of a taxpayer's family
member can do the same. The disruptions caused by these events may be so radical as to
transport the person, as it were, into crip time, an experience of time radically different than
the norm. Or it may not. But regardless, the Internal Revenue Code as it currently operates does
not even fairly reflect the economic reality, and it deprives many taxpayers who have large
medical expenses of the full tax value of those expenditures. It discriminates even more acutely
against those who have such expenses over many years, and it discriminates irrationally, on the
basis of those expenses' timing.
We all live in normative time. Or rather, we all live under it-under a regime structured
by it-seemingly inescapably. Philosophers dating back at least to Immanuel Kant have reflected
on the nature of time, as a necessary condition of apperception, seeking to account for how and
why all our human experiences necessarily take place in time. But it has taken the work of some
radical disability theorists, practitioners of self-described crip theory, to identify the concept of
normative time, by distinguishing it from what some of them call crip time. It is normative
time that regulates our industrialized world, and our academic world. It puts us on daily, weekly,
1 The term crip, though perhaps jarring to some, is used by radical disability theorists themselves, and I use it as
they do, in a re-appropriative move analogous to that of Queer Theory. See, e.g., ROBERT MCRUER, CRIP THEORY:
CULTURAL SIGNS OF QUEERNESS AND DISABILITY (2006); ROBERT MCRUER, CRIP TIMES: DISABILITY,
GLOBALIZATION, AND RESISTANCE (2018); CRIP TEMPORALITIES (Ellen Samuels & Elizabeth Freeman eds., 2021);
ALISON KAFER, FEMINIST, QUEER, CRIP (2013); Ellen Samuels, Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time, 37 DISABILITY
STUD. Q. (2017); Tamar LeRoy, What Is Crip Time?, ACCESSIBILITY.COM (Nov. 30, 2021) [https://perma.cc/73QW-
84Q3]; Josefine Walivaara, Out of Time: Crip Time and Fantastic Resistance, 25 SC1. FICTION RES. ASS'N. REV. 238
(Summer 2022). See also ELIZABETH FREEMAN, TIME BINDS: QUEER TEMPORALITIES, QUEER HISTORIES (2010).
2 Adjunct Professor of Law, Pepperdine Caruso School of Law, Loyola Law School (Los Angeles). A.B., Harvard
College; J.D., UCLA School of Law; LL.M. (taxation), University of San Francisco School of Law. I wish to thank
organizers and participants of events where earlier versions of this paper have been presented: AALS Disabled Law
Professors and Allies Section Program, AALS 2024; LATCRIT 2023 Biennial Conference, Cornell University;
ClassCrits Conference, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles (February 9-10, 2024). All errors are, of course, my own.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/caveat58&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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