A Simple Fix For One Of Disabled People’s Injustices

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... For most disabled people, especially those whose impairments are significant enough to qualify for Social Security, health care isn’t a “just in case” insurance policy. It is a lifeline and the foundation for building a safe, satisfying, and fulfilling life.

There is a nominally logical rationale for reducing income and health care benefits for some disabled people when they marry. A disabled person on their own may need full benefits to survive. But if they marry, then their spouse can be relied upon to help support them, financially and logistically. So the disabled person who marries needs less financial support. There is also a more general assumption two people sharing a household can live the same lifestyle for less money than they can apart. Or so the reasoning goes.

But on another level, marriage penalties don’t stand up to broader, modern financial or moral scrutiny.

For one thing, marriage penalties are inconsistent. They affect some disabled people and not others. And those it does affect it impacts differently based on differences that most observers would say are pretty insignificant. Explaining each rule and formula for each situation would require a full article on its own, but in general, how marriage penalties play out for any particular disabled person on Social Security depends on several factors: ...

Because obviously, if you know about these penalties ahead of time, you can avoid them by “simply” not getting married. It’s a terrible position, and a gut-wrenching decision as anyone who is married or has wanted to marry well knows. But the penalty itself, and the supposed savings to the taxpayer, is easily avoided. But it’s also easily triggered if the people involved don’t know about it, or if they get bad advice about it. In a sense, the government hopes in part to save money by disabled people accidentally triggering these benefits reductions. The whole business around Social Security benefits and marriage is shady, and feels inherently discriminatory. It also violates some of the most basic and cherished norms of American society.