CBIA’s goal for 2025 legislative session: Make CT more affordable

As the General Assembly convenes its 2025 legislative session on Wednesday, the Connecticut Business & Industry Association has set its sights on convincing lawmakers that the state needs to be a less expensive place to live and do business.

One committee co-chair, however, says at least one item on CBIA’s agenda won’t be raised during the session.

Still, whether talking about the cost of energy or health insurance, or the need to fill 73,000 job openings across the state, affordability would help solve many of Connecticut’s woes, says CBIA President & CEO Chris DiPentima.

“If you make Connecticut more affordable, obviously we'll keep more people here,” DiPentima said during a recent interview with Hartford Business Journal. “We'll attract people to the state — that will grow the workforce, that will grow the economy. And so our package of solutions is all really around affordability.”

In September, CBIA, the state’s largest business organization, published its latest public policy pledge, called Reimagine Connecticut. Its 12-point package of policy solutions is intended to “unlock and reimagine” the state’s economy, the organization said.

Following the election in November, a combination of 72 legislators who will serve in the 2025 session — 10 senators and 62 representatives — pledged to support CBIA’s policy solutions. 

Equally important to DiPentima, though, is that the pledges came from Democrats (34) as well as Republicans (38). Combined, they represent 38.5% of the members of the General Assembly.

Association health plans

Among its policy solutions, CBIA once again is seeking support for legislation to address the shrinking options in the fully-insured small group market. The bill would allow qualifying chambers of commerce and trade associations to aggregate their respective memberships and offer regulated, self-funded health benefit arrangements — essentially acting as one large employer.

The association health plan bill has been raised in the legislature the past two years, but failed both times.

That led CBIA to launch a new program, available through CBIA’s Health Connections, that is intended to help address the offerings decline in the small group health insurance market.  

Last year, Cigna Healthcare and New York-based technology company Oscar in May informed policyholders in the state that they will end their plan, which was launched jointly a few years ago. That was followed in June by Aetna announcing it will also exit the market. 

Farmington-based ConnectiCare and nonprofit Harvard Pilgrim HealthCare have both also exited the fully insured market during the past couple of years.

DiPentima said CBIA’s program, which is available for businesses with 10 or more employees, has been well received but is not enough.

“It’s been pretty successful so far, hopefully helping businesses and their employees lower costs,” he said. “But we still need more options out in the marketplace, and especially for those businesses that have less than 10 employees.

‘I can’t get it passed’

Unfortunately, the co-chair of the legislature’s Insurance and Real Estate Committee says there just isn’t enough support for the bill.

“I won't be putting the bill forward because I can't get it passed,” said Rep. Kerry Wood (D-Rocky Hill). 

Wood said that while she supports the concept “100%,” she didn’t support the versions of the bill considered during the past two legislative sessions.

“We compromised on it heavily,” she said. “I support a true association health plan bill where you allow people to pull together, share their risk and purchase like a large employer. And I also support underwriting at the group level, not at the individual level, so that would really help with that risk mitigation.”

Neither of the previous versions of the bill had that, she said, “because we had negotiated heavily with all these people at the table in good faith, who, at the end of the day, had no interest in helping us get the bill passed.”

This year, Wood says, the bill “is supported everywhere you go in the state outside the building, but as soon as you get into the Capitol there's very little support to move it forward.”

Someone who does support the bill is Rep. Cara Pavalock-D’Amato (R-Bristol), the ranking Republican on the committee.

“I'll still push it forward, because it's important to me and it's important to my constituents,” Pavalock-D’Amato said. “It's important to the small businesses that live in my town.”

She said that, unlike private association health plans, proposals to have small businesses and nonprofits join the state employee health plan could ultimately place the burden on taxpayers.

“I don't know why we keep looking to the government to solve our problems and for everything to rely on the back of taxpayers,” she said. “It's frustrating.”

One reason cited for the lack of support for the association health plan bill is the effort among some Democratic caucus members to revive the public option bill, which they believe would offer individuals and small businesses a lower-cost option. 

Sen. Jorge Cabrera (D-Hamden) stated publicly in September that legislators need to “re-double our efforts to pass a public option here in Connecticut.” He added that it should “be a priority” for the General Assembly in the 2025 session.

Other issues

The association health plan issue is just one among many of the policy solutions offered by CBIA. 

One of its top focus points for the new legislative session is the high, and rising, cost of electricity in the state.

“It is a big affordability issue,” DiPentima said. “Not just for the cost of doing business, but again, making the cost of living in Connecticut more affordable.”

Residential customers of both Eversource Energy and The United Illuminating Co. (UI) were shocked in July when their electric bills soared — rising an average of 30% for Eversource customers and 35% for UI customers.

Commercial and industrial companies also were outraged by massive increases, with corporate executives saying state officials need to address a variety of issues related to energy in this legislative session to make the cost of power more stable and predictable.

Connecticut has the fourth-most expensive electric rates in the nation, behind only Hawaii, Maine and Florida, according to a study released in February by Texas Electricity Ratings.

CBIA’s solution is to copy Massachusetts, which also has power provided by Eversource and, while its rates are high, they are lower than those in Connecticut.

Massachusetts, DiPentima said, has set up a Grid Management Authority Council (GMAC), which brings together utility officials, regulators, ratepayers, businesses and policymakers in an open meeting to develop a five-year strategic plan for energy, “both where they want to go on sustainability but also where they want to go on cost and, equally important, reliability.”

DiPentima says a similar system in Connecticut could help with the cost of energy, while also alleviating some of the animosity between state regulators and utility officials.

“Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, let's copy the wheel from somewhere else and then make it better and make it so it works here in our state,” he said.

DiPentima also stressed that another top focus for CBIA in this session is retaining the state’s fiscal “guardrails,” which he said have “put us in this incredible financial position, one that we did not have pre-pandemic, with six years of budget surpluses.”

Maintaining the guardrails is critical, he said, especially given the uncertainty around what the new administration in Washington D.C. will mean for federal financial funding and tax changes.

“If we make adjustments to the fiscal guardrails between now and when we adjourn our session in June,” he said, “come September there may be changes at the federal level that undo everything we just did.” 

He added, “You always get concerned that a tweak today is a major adjustment tomorrow and ends up being that slippery slope or that Pandora’s box.”

While there are other items on the CBIA agenda — including boosting manufacturing and trades job growth, expanding access to affordable child care, streamlining state and local permitting, and implementing first-time homebuyer tax incentives — DiPentima comes back to the overarching goal of making the state more affordable as the key point.

“That's our overall message to the legislature this year, the elected officials and the governor's office — everything we do this year, every bill that they look at, needs to be looked at with an eye toward affordability,” he said. “Will this piece of legislation make Connecticut more affordable? Will it lower the cost of living so that we keep more people in the state and attract more people to the state?”

He continued, “If a bill does not do that, if it has nothing to do with affordability or does not definitively lower the cost of living in Connecticut, that's not a bill they should be taking up right now.”