CBIA's recommendations for a healthy Connecticut economy

Competitive costs:

• Health care
• State spending & State taxes
• Energy, Environment & Land Use
• Labor & employment

Skilled workforce

Transportation

Health care

(Jan. 9, 2008) About two-thirds of Connecticut residents have health insurance through their employers, and the vast majority are satisfied with this system. Still, much can be done to improve it. On the other hand, tax-funded, government-run health care is financially unsustainable, can’t provide groundbreaking medical innovation, and could cause the rationing of health care and an exodus of doctors from the state.

Recommendations

• 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. Our current health care system can be improved by:
  • Advancing the development of a secure and fully interoperable system for health information exchange and electronic medical records to reduce medical duplication and errors and improve medical outcomes.
  • Promoting healthier lifestyles by providing incentives for employer-based wellness and disease-management programs and targeting outreach efforts to groups with higher incidences of chronic diseases, such as diabetes.
  • Reducing cost shifts from Medicaid to private-sector payers by raising the state's reimbursement level for Medicaid providers' costs.
  • Using cost-containment methods and other tools to continue to detect and prevent Medicaid fraud and ensure that proper payments are being made.
  • Giving consumers more health care quality and cost data so they can make better-informed medical choices.
  • Making lower-cost health insurance available to consumers by allowing health plans to create more-flexible health benefit designs and policies with fewer mandated coverages.
  • Establishing a moratorium on costly new health insurance mandates.
• Reject attempts to mandate government-run health care purchasing pools, which will drive up costs and taxes.
• Moderate overall health care costs by requiring the state to adopt improvements to state-employee health plans recommended by the business community.
• Reject any new health care taxes that could drive up costs and limit access to care for some people.