By State Senator Dan Debicella

The General Assembly needs to take action this year to address the core problem of healthcare: out-of-control costs. Reducing healthcare costs will both help the middle class and help more of the uninsured afford healthcare.

For over twenty years, the cost of healthcare has been rising at twice the rate of everything else. Some of this inflation is actually a good thing; the US has the best medical care in the world, and cutting edge technology and drugs cost money. However, our system has also artificially added costs that are hurting families. My proposals will focus on eliminating these costs while maintaining our best-in-class healthcare system.

First, we need to look at healthcare in a totally different way—as preventing illness rather than just curing it. Curing an illness is much more expensive than preventing the problem in the first place. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, early detection would reduce billions of dollars spent on cancer and heart disease treatment—the two leading causes of health problems in the US. Identifying and preventing disease before it becomes life threatening not only reduce costs, it will save lives.

Second, we need to eliminate government-caused healthcare inflation. State government imposes over fifty mandates of different treatments that must be included in everyone’s health insurance. Many of these treatments are only used by less than 0.1% of the population, but everyone is required to pay for them in their insurance premium. The government is essentially mandating that costs increase to cover rare diseases, rather than letting you choose what you want covered.

Third, we need to create more transparency and competition in health care. How much did it cost you for your last doctor’s visit? Most people have no idea. We need to create price transparency in healthcare so people can compare quality and cost of different healthcare providers. Allowing consumers to make educated choices in the market will enable competition to bring down prices as it does in so many areas of our economy.

With these causes of healthcare inflation in mind, I will propose legislation this year to focus our efforts on prevention, remove government-caused cost increases, and promote market-oriented solutions to reduce costs for everyone. If the General Assembly adopts my package of reforms, not only will those of us who already have health insurance pay less, but the uninsured will be more able to afford the cost of premiums and co-pays.

My legislative proposals for this year include:

• Create Tax Breaks for Healthy Living: Individuals whose entire family meets the preventative guidelines established by the American Medical Association would be permitted to deduct their healthcare premiums from the state income tax. For a family with $3,000 in healthcare premiums, that is a $150 savings each year.

• Eliminate Healthcare Mandates: Healthcare mandates increase costs for everyone by requiring us to buy coverage for diseases most of us have a statistically infinitesimal chance of getting. My proposal calls for eliminating all of these costly state mandates—but requiring insurance companies to offer all the coverage as “a la carte” options for people who want them.

• Reforming Tort Lawsuits: The rising cost of malpractice medical insurance is passed on to consumers. My proposal calls for limiting the non-economic damages awarded in medical malpractice cases to $500,000, and lawyers’ fees to 10 percent of the total damages.

• Increasing Transparency and Choice: Given the opportunity, consumers will take steps to lower their own healthcare costs. My proposal calls for requiring all doctors and insurance providers to post their rates on a centralized website accessible to all healthcare consumers.

• Taking Advantage of Technology: We should create a centralized medical records database to enable doctors to share information in ways their benefit their patients - at the same time reducing paperwork and administrative costs, and improving the ability to quickly make decisions.

None of these are a “silver bullet”, but I believe taken together they will reduce premiums for all of us who have insurance, and make insurance more affordable for the uninsured.

My more liberal colleagues in the State Senate will say that cost-reduction is not the right solution. They want a Canadian-style government-run healthcare system to cover the 6% of people without insurance. They believe that if government ran all healthcare, then we could cover everyone. What they do not tell you is they will make healthcare worse for the 94% of us with health insurance, and raise taxes dramatically to pay for it.

Making health insurance worse for 94% of us and raising taxes is not the right way to cover the uninsured. Instead, Governor Rell is implementing a practical solution to help the uninsured: her new Charter Oak Health Plan for uninsured adults. The Charter Oak Health Plan provides affordable private insurance for uninsured adults of all incomes, as HUSKY already does for otherwise uninsured children. My proposals to reduce premiums go hand-in-hand with the Charter Oak Health Plan, and will enable more people to purchase insurance.

Our families deserve affordable healthcare, and I will be working hard to develop a bipartisan consensus to implement common-sense ways to reduce healthcare costs in Connecticut.