I've heard of (and written about) "job lock," in which people stay with a job they don't like simply because it has health insurance. But marriage lock?

The Los Angeles Times reports on what you might call "marriage for health insurance."

Now I'm all for marriage and its social benefits, but if people are so desperate for insurance that they plunge into marriage with that as a primary goal of marriage, something's wrong with the laws that govern insurance.

The story does of course mention job lock as well, with 25% of people in a recent poll saying they "had decided to keep or change jobs in the last year because of health insurance."

Job lock means there's a mismatch between a person's skill set and preferences on the one hand, and a job on the other. That's bad for productivity and general well-being.

Marrying for insurance--which apparently is what 7% of the people in the survey did--presents opportunities for even more severe personal damage.

More reason to first of all, make health care affordable (harnessing competition, market forces, price transparency, etc.) and make health insurance affordable and not tied to employment.