{"id":536343,"date":"2010-04-20T18:07:17","date_gmt":"2010-04-20T22:07:17","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogs.courant.com,2010:\/capitol_watch\/\/9.76442"},"modified":"2010-04-20T18:17:13","modified_gmt":"2010-04-20T22:17:13","slug":"house-unanimously-passes-prescription-pooling-bill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/536343","title":{"rendered":"House Unanimously Passes Prescription Pooling Bill"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

State lawmakers are still pushing for municipal and state workers to join together to try to lower the cost of health care. <\/p>\n

In years past, health-care “pooling” bills would have opened up the state employee’s insurance plan to municipalities, small businesses and nonprofit organizations, but Gov. M. Jodi Rell vetoed them because of financial concerns, and the General Assembly did not have enough support for a override.<\/p>\n

Rell’s back-to-back vetoes caused lawmakers to rethink their approach, and this year, they crafted a bill that is thought to be health-care pooling on a smaller scale. <\/p>\n

The bill was unanimously passed by the House Tuesday and would require the comptroller to open up the state employee’s self-insured prescription drug plan to nonstate public employees, such as municipal workers and workers for other state political subdivisions, such as school boards, quasi-public agencies and public libraries. Participation would be voluntary.<\/p>\n

The bill would also require the comptroller to establish procedures for opening up the drug plan.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

The legislature’s budget office says the state and cities and town could potentially save money coming together to purchase prescription drugs, but it has not determined how much the savings would be.<\/p>\n

Many groups, including the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities and Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, testified in favor of opening up the state’s drug plan at an insurance and real estate committee public hearing in February. Only Anthem Blue Cross & Blue Shield had reservations. One of the insurance company’s concerns was that if the state’s plan was opened up, the state would initially attract groups that carry a higher monthly claims expense, which could threaten rate adequacy and pool viability.<\/p>\n

In the bill passed Tuesday, cities and towns would only partner with the state for purchasing purposes. Risks would not be pooled.   <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

State lawmakers are still pushing for municipal and state workers to join together to try to lower the cost of health care. In years past, health-care “pooling” bills would have opened up the state employee’s insurance plan to municipalities, small businesses and nonprofit organizations, but Gov. M. Jodi Rell vetoed them because of financial concerns, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-536343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}