The Center for American Progress (with the American Society on Aging, and the National Senior Citizens Law Center), has released a new report,  Improving the Lives of LGBT Older Adults (pdf), and part of the release regarding the report follows:

Older LGBT Americans have been largely invisible until very recently. Yet they make up a significant and growing share of the LGBT and over 65 populations. LGBT elders are gaining visibility with the aging of LGBT Baby Boomers, who are the first generation of LGBT people to have lived openly gay or transgender lives in large numbers.

These individuals confront all the same challenges of people who age. But they also face unique barriers and inequalities that stem from the effects of social stigmas and prejudice, their reliance on informal “families of choice” for care and support, and inequitable laws and programs that treat LGBT elders unequally. These barriers can prevent LGBT elders from achieving three key elements of successful aging: financial security, good health and health care, and social support and community engagement.

That’s why Services and Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, & Transgender Elders and theMovement Advancement Project recently released “Improving the Lives of LGBT Older Adults” in partnership with the Center for American Progress, the American Society on Aging, and the National Senior Citizens Law Center, which provides an overview of LGBT elders’ unique needs and the policy and regulatory changes that are needed to adequately address them.

Challenges for LGBT elders

The report outlines three unique circumstances that make successful aging more difficult for LGBT elders than for their heterosexual counterparts:

• The effects of social stigma and prejudice, past and present. Historical prejudice against today’s LGBT elders has disrupted their lives, their connections to their families of origin, their chances at having and raising their own children, and their opportunities to earn a living and save for retirement. This prejudice also impedes full and equal access to important health and community services, programs, and opportunities.
• Reliance on informal “families of choice” for social connections, care, and support. Family members provide about 80 percent of long-term care in the United States, and more than two-thirds of adults who receive long-term care at home depend on family members as their only source of help. Yet LGBT elders are more likely to be single, childless, and estranged from biological family and therefore must often rely on friends and community members as their chosen family. Official policies, laws, and institutional regulations and practices generally prioritize legal and biological family, and in many instances deny caregivers who do not fall into traditional categories the resources and recognition afforded to opposite-sex spouses and biological family members.
• Inequitable laws and programs fail to address—or create extra barriers to—social acceptance, financial security, and better health and well-being for LGBT elders. Safety net programs and laws intended to support and protect older Americans fail to provide equal protection for LGBT elders. This is largely because they either do not acknowledge or do not provide protections for LGBT elders’ partners and families of choice, and because they fail to recognize and address the ongoing stigma and discrimination that result in substandard treatment of LGBT elders.

The challenges identified above diminish LGBT elders’ prospects for successful aging by making it harder to secure financial security; good health and health care; and social and community support.

Financial security

LGBT elders as a group are poorer and less financially secure than older Americans as a whole. Financial instability comes from a lifetime of discrimination combined with major laws and safety net programs that fail to protect and support LGBT elders in the same way they do heterosexual elders. Data show the grim effects of this unequal treatment—lesbian couples receive an average of 31.5 percent less in Social Security, and gay couples receive 17.8 percent less when compared to heterosexual couples.

Barriers

Social Security. LGBT elders pay into Social Security just like their heterosexual peers, yet they are not equally eligible for Social Security benefits. The biggest difference in treatment is that committed same-sex couples are denied the substantial spousal and survivor benefits provided to married couples.

Medicaid and long-term care. Medicaid is the largest funder of long-term care in the United States. Medicaid has exemptions for married heterosexual couples to avoid requiring a healthy spouse to sell a shared home or to live in poverty to qualify an ill spouse for long-term care. But these spousal impoverishment protections do not apply to same-sex couples and families of choice.

Tax-qualified retirement plans. There have been some positive changes in the law in recent years, but LGBT elders still lack the same benefits as their heterosexual peers when it comes to the treatment of IRAs and similar plans. For example, surviving heterosexual spouses can leave inherited retirement accounts to grow tax free until they reach age 70 and a half, but “non-spouse” beneficiaries cannot.

Employee pensions and defined-benefit plans. Employer policies regarding the Qualified Joint and Survivor Annuity and Qualified Pre-retirement Survivor Annuity deprive same-sex couples of needed financial protections for a surviving partner or chosen family member, though these protections are available for heterosexual spouses.

Retiree health insurance benefits. Federal tax law currently allows an employer to provide health insurance to the heterosexual spouse of an employee or retired employee as a tax-free benefit, but for same-sex couples, a partner’s insurance benefits are treated as taxable income.

Estate taxes and inheritance laws. The federal government allows a surviving heterosexual spouse to inherit all of the couple’s assets without incurring any tax penalty, but federal and state laws require same-sex partners to pay inheritance taxes on some estates. LGBT elders in most cases must put in place a series of specific and often expensive legal arrangements to try to ensure that financial decision making and inheritance will pass to a partner or member of a family of choice.

Veterans’ benefits. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs provides a variety of benefits to veterans’ heterosexual spouses, including pensions paid to the spouse of a service member killed in combat, medical care, and home loan guarantees. These benefits are not available to a same-sex partner.

Read the report: Improving the Lives of LGBT Older Adults (pdf) and the rest of the release: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/04/lgbt_elders.html