Maryland agencies have started letting state employees with same-sex spouses enroll for health benefits.
The state’s Office of Budget and Management has updated its benefits policy and asked all Maryland agencies to comply, according to agency memos sent to the state legislature’s human resources department.
But same-sex couples still won’t be eligible for marriage-related tax breaks, and they won’t receive any additional benefits, either.
The state comptroller’s office spent several months studying whether Maryland could offer gay couples marriage-related tax breaks following a February mandate from Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler that state agencies begin recognizing out-of-state gay marriages.
“Federal tax law is going to have to change or the state legislature is going to have to tweak things” before same-sex couples in Maryland will see any such tax breaks, said Joe Shapiro, spokesman for the comptroller’s office.
Maryland already extends health benefits to same-sex couples who register as “domestic partners” — meaning they share a bank account and home address, and agree to sign a contract saying they have been in a relationship for at least one year. The policy change does not award additional benefits to domestic partners — it simply removes the registration legwork, requiring only a marriage certificate to obtain joint insurance.
The change will likely cost the state, said Austin R. Nimocks, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal team that supports opposite-sex marriage.
“If you add people to insurance rolls it’s going to increase the cost,” he said.
But Gov. Martin O’Malley’s office said possible costs have already been worked into the budget.
“We expect that any additional costs will have already been accounted for under the initial domestic partner enrollment projections,” said O’Malley spokesman Shaun Adamec. Adamec said he expects 10 to 20 people to enroll by June 2, the end of the special enrollment period.
Congress is considering legislation that would extend health benefits to federal employees with same-sex partners. But the proposal has come under intense scrutiny in the last week after the Congressional Budget Office released a report estimating the change would cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion over the next 10 years.
