CBIA’s Priorities for 2008

(Jan. 9, 2008) Improving Connecticut’s economy to boost job creation and requires a clear agenda that focuses on the state’s greatest challenges and opportunities. Here are priorities set by CBIA’s Board of Directors for 2008.

Competitive costs

Control health care costs and expand access to quality care.

• Improve Connecticut's market-based, employer-sponsored health care system and reject efforts to replace it with a tax-funded, government-run health care system.
• Make greater use of technology, including electronic medical records, to reduce medical duplication and errors and enable consumers to make better-informed health care choices.
• Promote healthier lifestyles by encouraging employer-based wellness and disease-management programs. Target outreach to groups with higher incidences of chronic diseases such as diabetes.
• Reduce cost shifts from Medicaid to private-sector payers by raising the state's Medicaid reimbursement level for providers' costs. Continue efforts to detect and prevent fraud in the Medicaid system and ensure that proper payments are being made.
• Make lower-cost health insurance available to consumers by allowing health plans to create more-flexible health benefit designs and policies with fewer mandated coverages.
• Prevent any additional, costly health insurance mandates from passing.
• Reject attempts to mandate expensive government-run health care purchasing pools that will drive up costs and taxes.

Use prudent fiscal policy to drive economic development.

• Ensure that revisions to the second year of the biennial state budget adhere to the constitutional spending cap.
• Control state spending by making greater use of performance-based budgeting and best practices in all state operations.
• Reverse the erosion of taxpayers' privacy, administrative and judicial rights and remedies.
• Accelerate the phaseout of the personal property tax on manufacturing machinery and equipment.

Reduce high energy costs and improve energy reliability.

• Facilitate the expansion of interstate and intrastate transmission lines and natural gas pipelines.
• Expand cost-effective energy conservation and demand-response programs.

Reject workplace-related measures that discourage job creation in the state.

• Maintain employers' ability to design operational and personnel workplace policies that best meet their own and employees' needs.
• Defeat proposals that would drive up workers' compensation or other costs.

Skilled workforce

Improve the overall academic performance of Connecticut students.

• Raise high school academic standards and graduation requirements and give students and teachers the support and resources they need to succeed.
• Increase the availability of skilled manufacturing workers by upgrading the state's technical high schools and community colleges, promoting manufacturing careers, and improving the skills of current employees.
• Help potential and current employees improve their skills and access to high-paying jobs by providing employer-driven training, such as customized job-training programs and apprenticeships.

Transportation

Improve the state Department of Transportation's (DOT's) ability to plan and execute high-priority transportation improvements.

• Continue to focus resources on the highest priority transportation challenges, including those along the I-95 corridor in southwestern Connecticut.
• Adopt the recommendations of the Governor's Commission on the Reform of the Connecticut Department of Transportation that improve the operations and efficiency of the department.
• Expand efforts to increase the impact of Bradley International Airport as an economic driver.