ALBANY – Taking a nudge from an Appellate Division, First Department panel, the Legislature may be poised to reform a 65-year-old insurance provision that makes New York the only state where policies providing coverage for every other passenger of an automobile may exclude spouses.
An identical bill in both houses of the Legislature would revise Insurance Law �3420(g), which the First Department termed an “anachronistic” statute. The practical – or, critics would say, impractical – impact of that provision is that when an accident is caused by a driver’s negligence, every passenger of the vehicle is covered, except one: the spouse. A bill sponsored in the Assembly by Assemblywoman Helene Weinstein, D-Brooklyn, and in the Senate by Senator James L. Seward, R-Oneonta, would require insurers to notify policyholders of the exclusion and to offer supplemental liability insurance.
