Maryland Proposal Would Require Short Term Disability Benefits For Pregnancy Leave

It can be hard to tell in the early stages of a state legislative session which proposals have a legitimate chance of passing and which ones are dead in the water.

That said, Maryland HB 1335 may be worth watching. It would require certain employers to offer short term disability benefits to employees who are pregnant and would require the employer to pay 80% of the premium cost for such coverage. Benefits would be provided for 125 work days for an employee who is unable to work due to a pregnancy-related condition and 30 work days for an employee on maternity leave. Benefit levels would be “graded” to afford higher income replacement levels for employees with more seniority.

Apart from the mandatory sick leave law that Connecticut passed a couple years ago, there has not been much legislative push at the state level for expanding state-required benefits for non-occupational sickness or injury. An Oregon proposal several years ago went nowhere. And with tenuous signs of an economic recovery only now beginning to appear, there may be little room for this sort of program in revenue-strapped state budgets. But it may be a sign of things to come, not tomorrow and probably not the day after that either. At some point though, once health care reform has dug itself in a little more firmly, don’t be surprised if insurance-related reform shifts over to proposals like the Maryland bill.