This proposal allows one and only one OQA to be added to the policy, and provides NO state money towards the costs.  It merely allows the roommate of a state employee to buy health coverage in the state system and thus enjoy the benefit of a large group policy.  Enabling someone to buy health insurance in this way hardly constitutes extending the benefits of marriage to unmarried people.   No more so than allowing unmarried people to buy diamond rings.

The negative comments I have been reading on this list ( fraud - 20 people living together - break the state budget - violate the state constitution - etc. ) seem mostly to have been written by people who did not bother to get their facts straight by actually reading the provisions of the proposal.