Gov. Ned Lamont was sworn into office in January 2019, and now six years later he’s still vexed by the issue of shrinking health insurance options for businesses.
During Hartford Business Journal’s inaugural Politics & Policy Forum: 2025 Legislative Session Recap, held Tuesday morning at the Society Room of Hartford with more than 100 people in attendance, the topic of business health insurance was discussed both during a fireside chat with Lamont and a conversation with House Speaker Matt Ritter (D-Hartford) and Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding Jr. (R-Brookfield).
Asked about a previous proposal to create a state-operated public option, a controversial bill that never got very far in the General Assembly, Lamont offered mixed thoughts, but acknowledged the challenge of Connecticut still being considered a top hub for the insurance industry.
Stating that while Connecticut has some of “the very best health care in the country,” with “amazingly good hospital systems,” Lamont said that the lobbyists for those systems “are pretty powerful.”
“Let me tell you, anytime I make a suggestion, 50 doctors will call up a legislator, and it’s done,” he said.
Lamont said he would support legislation to allow small companies and associations to form groups to purchase more affordable health insurance. Bills seeking to allow the so-called “association health plans” have failed during recent legislative sessions.
“The association plan, it’s a good idea,” Lamont said. “Anytime you can get a little purchasing power for small business, that doesn’t bother me.”
The governor said he would like to see “some ideas from the business community about how we can go forward,” and would like to see hospitals and insurers take the lead on that, perhaps “coming up with a preferred network, where people are directed or go to places where you get a lot better value.”
He added that he wants to “sit down with the hospitals and insurance and see what we can do.”
Following the governor’s remarks, Ritter and Harding also weighed in on what is becoming an increasingly shrinking commercial health insurance market.
Earlier this month, after announcing in May it plans to end its self-funded and level-funded insurance business in Connecticut beginning in July, Farmington-based insurer ConnectiCare told brokers it will also exit the fully insured large group market in the state.
ConnectiCare is the first major insurance company to exit the fully insured large group market in Connecticut, but for small business groups, Aetna, Cigna/Oscar Health and nonprofit Harvard Pilgrim HealthCare have all joined ConnectiCare in exiting that market here since 2022.
That has left just two carriers — Anthem and UnitedHealthcare — providing fully insured plans to small employers, which has contributed to higher costs for companies with 50 or fewer workers, experts say.
Ritter responded to a question about the issue by praising Rep. Kerry Wood (D-Rocky Hill), who co-chairs the legislature’s Insurance and Real Estate Committee and was in the audience Tuesday.
Wood, he said, “worked very hard on association health plans, and I know that for CBIA (the Connecticut Business & Industry Association) it has been a major priority. In our caucus, there are some people who are against any notion of it, no matter how much we change it and account for their concerns. But I think in the House, we continue to try to push that policy.”
Ritter said the concerns mostly have to do with the potential to draw people away from the state’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchange, Access Health CT. That concern has become more acute because Congress is expected to eliminate federal subsidies for health insurance.
“There’s been a lot of pressure on states to deal with this,” Ritter said. “And how do you subsidize health care? Because people are going to see a huge cliff in what their subsidies have been for the last couple of years.”
He also cautioned that, “The reality is, Connecticut can’t subsidize it. We don’t have the resources to do that.”
Those subsidies and potential cuts to Medicaid will likely be among the topics to be addressed during a special session of the legislature expected to be held in September, Ritter said, adding that the General Assembly will be “talking a lot” about those topics in the next year.
Harding said he supports the proposal for association health plans, and even identified it as a top priority for the 2026 legislative session, an abbreviated session that begins Feb. 4 and ends May 6.
“I think that that is a huge, monumental step for small businesses, for health insurance, for health care, for the people in the state,” Harding said of association health plans. “And that’s probably one thing that I really want to take another look at, particularly now with some of the issues of the federal government that Speaker Ritter has mentioned.”
He also praised Wood for her efforts on the bill, saying association health plans make “logical sense.”
“It would allow organizations to kind of collaborate with smaller employers together, and then be able to negotiate with the insurance companies in that manner to create a much better plan,” Harding said.
The legislation, he added, would also help small businesses compete by making them better able to attract workers because they could offer less expensive health insurance benefits.
“Now more than ever, it’s really important to implement a healthcare plan in the state that’s affordable for everybody,” he said.
