Will Connecticut Cover the Uninsured?


Connecticut’s state Senate Democratic leaders have gotten more real than anyone so far in pursuing medical insurance coverage for all.

The Senate Democrats propose to spend $450 million more per year to increase payments to medical providers for treating people with state-sponsored insurance and to expand eligibility for such insurance. This, the Democrats figure, would hasten treatment for thousands of people who now are being turned away because state payments are so much below market rates and would extend coverage to about half the estimated 260,000 people in the state who lack medical insurance — provided that those people or their parents cooperated.

Gov. Rell wants the state to organize the uninsured into a large and healthy pool that insurers will offer them a basic medical policy for $250 per person per month. But there is no hard evidence that any insurers


 will offer a basic policy for that price, and there is much evidence that many of the uninsured cannot afford to pay $250 per month. They well may continue to gamble on their health and their children’s.

 

 


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But if the Senate Democrats have offered more of a plan than the governor has, it is, as she notes, only half a plan, for the Democrats have not proposed how to pay for it. That price of $450 million annually, about 3 percent of the current state budget and about half the state surplus, is sure to increase every year. Further, as the governor notes, state government


 already has reached the limit on spending allowed by the state Constitution,.

 

It is not much help to propose spending more to solve the insurance problem. It would be more helpful to

 

It is not much help to propose spending more to solve the insurance problem. It would be more helpful to

 find that kind of money.

 

Before the Senate Democrats again start chanting "millionaire’s tax," a tax the governor is pledged to veto, they should remember that they already have promised the revenue from such a tax to "property tax reform" and a dozen other undertakings, and that a "millionaire’s tax" probably wouldn’t raise half as much as would be necessary to cover the uninsured as they have proposed.

The governor is right to be concerned about spending, which the Senate Democrats are not yet. And since the spending cap in the constitution was offered to the people in 1992, in exchange for their having accepted the burden of the state income tax the previous year, it ought to mean something, for the sake of the integrity of state government.

 

Before the Senate Democrats again start chanting "millionaire’s tax," a tax the governor is pledged to veto, they should remember that they already have promised the revenue from such a tax to "property tax reform" and a dozen other undertakings, and that a "millionaire’s tax" probably wouldn’t raise half as much as would be necessary to cover the uninsured as they have proposed.

The governor is right to be concerned about spending, which the Senate Democrats are not yet. And since the spending cap in the constitution was offered to the people in 1992, in exchange for their having accepted the burden of the state income tax the previous year, it ought to mean something, for the sake of the integrity of state government.


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The best compromise might be for the governor and the Senate Democrats to launch a campaign to cut state spending by the cost of coverage for the medically uninsured — for both sides to proclaim that someone other than taxpayers should sacrifice on behalf of those who are living on the edge.

And where better to start than with Connecticut government’s own personnel, state and municipal employees, whose own medical insurance, pension and other fringe benefits are gold-plated and whose salaries are almost always far superior to the salaries paid for similar work in private industry?

Even as costs of state and municipal government increase substantially each year, most of the extra expense arises from increases in employee compensation, not from any improvement in public service. What is called "aid to local education," increased every year, is mainly reimbursement for increased compensation for school employees.

Connecticut’s system of binding arbitration for public employee union contracts gives employee compensation the highest priority in government and makes it what is so tediously called a "fixed cost" — a cost beyond ordinary democratic review and control. So ever since binding arbitration was enacted 30 years ago the highest ambition in government in Connecticut has not been to improve service to the public but rather to become a "fixed cost."

If Connecticut could suspend binding arbitration for a few years and freeze government employee compensation, all the medically uninsured could be covered without worsening state government’s already precarious financial position. That would be social justice.

 

 

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.

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