A coalition of Connecticut groups has been organizing small business people, activists, and others this year to try to pass some form of universal health care at the beginning of 2007. One of the candidates for governor has echoed the call for universal health care, as has U.S. Senate candidate Ned Lamont. And that's pretty much what Massachusetts did Tuesday. Conservative Republicans, led by Gov. Mitt Romney, joined with liberal Democrats in the state legislature to pass a plan that should cover close to everyone in the state with some form of insurance. The plan requires businesses to provide health care coverage and requires individuals to obtain insurance, or to pay a fee to the state. (Click here to read more about that plan.) Business groups were part of the coalition supporting the law.

"It's going to help us to show that a neighboring state has taken this approach," said Looney, who serves as majority leader of Connecticut's State Senate. "Clearly it will move forward the debate. The Massachusetts system will at least give us some options and a model to look at."

An estimated 400,000 people in Connecticut lack health insurance.

Looney for years has championed a single-payer system under which government basically serves as the state's insurance agency. He said Wednesday that he believes it will probably take a national campaign to bring about single-payer. In the meantime, he said a plan more along the lines of Massachusetts' has a real chance of passage in Connecticut.

Also on Wednesday, President Bush flew to New Haven and spoke to a business group in Bridgeport about why he believes Health Savings Accounts can help cut down on the growing number of Americans -- now over 45 million -- who lack insurance.

While Connecticut's reformers envision a statewide universal health plan that differs drastically from Bush's notions, and may differ from Massachusetts', at least one leading activist said Wednesday that these latest developments will help bring the state closer to reaching its goal.

"It’s great that on the day the president comes here to talk about health care, we learn that our neighbors have just adopted a health care reform, a near universal health care policy," said Juan Figueroa, president of the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut. "It should give a tremendous amount of impetus to our lawmakers."

Figueroa was invited to attend Bush's event in Bridgeport, which Figueroa called more of an "infomercial" for Bush's policies than a dialogue.

Still, said Figueroa, “a couple of good things came out of it. The president came to the state and by virtue of coming to the state put a spotlight on health care. And several times he mentioned the problem is the third-party payer system we have. Wouldn’t it be nice if the consumer could pay directly to the doctor? That’s where most of our bureaucracy and the costs associated with health care are. I agree with him on that. But clearly health savings accounts are not going to resolve the problem of health care. We’ve had HSAs for a while now. People are not going up in droves to sign up for it. For good reason. It is not a public health policy designed to deliver quality health care for everybody."

CBIA Holds Back

A spokesman for Connecticut's main business lobbying group was more cautious about predicting any Nutmeg-state bounce from Massachusetts' vote.

In fact, suggested Joe Brennan, senior vice-president for public policy at the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, Connecticut might choose to differentiate itself from Massachusetts. Perhaps, he said, Connecticut could pitch itself to potential employers by saying that, unlike Massachusetts, we don't put mandates on business to pay for health care.

He also said he believes that the state shouldn't focus on requiring employers or individuals to pay more for health care. Instead, it should tackle the high cost of health care by removing mandates from insurance companies -- no longer requiring them, for instance, to cover infertility treatments or morbid obesity procedures.

However, Brennan stressed that the CBIA has not discussed the Massachusetts plan with its members or its board. So it's "premature" to predict how the organization would feel about a move to replicate it here.

Figueroa of the Universal Health Care group said he, too, is skeptical about one of the mandates in the Massachusetts plan -- specifically the requirement that all individuals must buy health insurance, as they now buy car insurance. "We need to think hard whether and to what extent you want to shift the burden to the individual rather than have a combination of federal and state and business and provider initiatives that gives you the resources and the creativity to cover everybody," he said. He said it's impossible to predict how closely a final Connecticut plan will mirror the Massachusetts plan; it depends on which groups participate most actively in negotiations.

Figueroa and State Sen. Looney disagreed sharply with Brennan's argument for focusing on removing mandates on insurance companies as a way of tackling that crisis. Or that Connecticut should compete for jobs by making fewer health care-related demands on insurance companies or employers.

Looney called on the business group to be "responsible" and follow the lead of its counterparts in Massachusetts. "That's absolutely the worst way to go -- limiting coverage plans with tremendous gaps and saying, 'We're providing coverage,'" Looney said.

"This debate about the mandates has been around for a while," he said. "I haven’t seen anything that really shows me in any of the literature that we’ve been looking at relative to health care reforms that point to the fact that insurance mandates are at the core of what is wrong with our health care system or at the core of why health care costs are so high. Most of the studies will tell you about the cost of medical technology, the bureaucracy involved in the third-party payer system…"

“CBIA is wrong on that. Even in this morning’s [Bridgeport business] crowd, you heard people who are in business talking about in order to maintain or better the competitive edge in business in the state is fixing the health care problem. Most people realized it was a much bigger, more complex problem," Figueroa said. "Want to maintain the competitive edge? It’s about fixing the health care system in a comprehensive way. Yes, lower costs. But make sure everybody in the end has access to a basic health insurance policy or a doctor for basic care.

“If anything, Massachusetts, whether you agree or not, has just taken a step toward making their state more attractive to business. They’re addressing the health care problem. They’re not hiding their head in the sand."

Full disclosure: The Universal Health Care Foundation is one of several charitable organizations that contribute money to the Online Journalism Project, which publishes this web site.