Married Homosexual couples getting bad insurance deals
Imagine being married to the person you love and still not being able to hold legal and financial benefits for taxes, retirement, property ownership, inheritance, auto insurance rates, family and medical care, even car rentals?
But for the thousands of gay and lesbian couples flocking to San Francisco to get married, whether they’ll be granted the rights and privileges that come with marriage is up in the air. Meanwhile, registered domestic partners in California currently have 15 of the same rights as married couples, such as hospital visitation and the ability to make medical decisions for an harmed partner.
An unmarried couple pays about 22 percent more for car insurance than married one; insurers may require one partner to be treated as a renter. Life insurance firms can challenge one partner’s “insurable interest” in the other.
When one partner dies, the law offers little consolation for a surviving same-sex partner. Gay-rights advocates tell distressing stories of people who lost their homes and were left destitute after a partner of many years died. Often they were hit with huge tax bills for their partner’s estate — married couples inherit from each other tax-free — and weren’t entitled to inherit Social Security or federal pensions.
Ironically though, even with so many disadvantages to same sex marriages in the USA starry-eyed couples still mass at City Hall seeming acutely aware of how an unmarried state penalizes them, even though that’s not why they’re lining up to wed.