Okay, so for those of you who don't know; three things...
1. recently the appellate court ruled that same sex marriages performed outside of New York must be recognized just like heterosexual marriages already are.
2. this means: if Alicia and I went to Canada and got married, we would be recognized (only in New York, maybe Mass, and Vermont too, but I'm not certain) as married, giving us, of many things, the right to get spousal health insurance through work, just like every other married couple.... and
3. Maggie Brooks, our county executive, decided to appeal this decision stating that it would be too expensive for the county to bear.... (I've already read some articles that say the appeal alone will cost more than the cost of insuring county employee's but we'll over look that so I can give you all an impressive/not so impressive display of my math skills).
Well, knowing all that, I did some unprofessional/ slightly imperfect research and found that it costs the county about $5,982-$7,249 to insure the average employee. Okay, without knowing how much it cost exactly to insure those who are married compared to those who, lets say, have four kids like us, I'll take an average, so, for arguments sake... $6,616.
I looked up on the county budget to find out how many county employees there are and found that there are 4,525 authorized full-time positions (With part timers there are 5,293 but I'm not sure if they get benefits so we'll go with the 4,525 number for this experiment).
The easy to read breakdown
I found that, in New York, only about 50% of people are married = 2,262 married employees
10% (high estimate) of the population has identified as homosexual = 226 committed homosexual couples (all of which would have to go get married).
How much it would cost a year to insure same-sex couples= $1,496,539
How much it already cost to insure heterosexual couples =$14,965,392
hmmmm.........
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