After a long week of travel that included planes, trains, buses, Ubers, my car, and a lot of walking, I am glad to be back in CT.
I spent most of the week at a conference of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) entitled Forecast ’23. NCSL is a comprehensive organization and resource for all the legislatures in the state, territories, and commonwealths of the US, and the NCSL conferences I’ve attended in the past have been great opportunities to take a deep dive into a specific subject area, learn how other states are handling similar issues, and network with other legislators from across the country. This particular conference was focused on the big picture, looking at the most pressing issues ahead, and trying to look around the corner at what we might be facing as a national economy. While many of us joked that the answer was “we don’t really know” (and some presenters chose different most likely cases), the real lesson is that we should be prepared for a variety of different scenarios, remain flexible, and sock some resources away just in cast.
The good news is that CT has been doing exactly that. In addition to the conference, my last week also included presentations from the Governor’s budget office (the Office of Policy and Management, or OPM) and our non-partisan fiscal analysists (the Office of Fiscal Analysis, or OFA). There was strong bipartisan acknowledgement on the call that CT’s responsible budgeting has created a robust Budgetary Reserve Fund (BRF, also known as the Rainy Day Fund) of over $3 billion, and has enabled us to pay down significant pension debt, saving significant taxpayer dollars in the future.
My plan to spend the conference days thinking big picture was foiled by the re-scheduling of the Sharon Hospital hearing, conducted by the Office of Health Strategy (OHS), which took place earlier this week. Starting at 9:30 am and lasting until 9:30pm, it was a marathon session in which more than 240 people participated. The issues are serious for all stakeholders, and the hearing officer did a fantastic job patiently ensuring everyone had a chance to speak, and that things kept moving. Nuvance presented its case that labor and delivery be closed at Sharon Hospital, after which Save Sharon Hospital (SSH), which was granted intervenor status to participate in the hearing, did the same. Both Nuvance and SSH were permitted to cross-examine each other’s witnesses, and OHS asked questions as well.
I was one of 11 witnesses for SSH. Most of the other witnesses were medical professionals, so my focus, as the elected representative of all the CT towns served by Sharon Hospital, was on the importance of these services to the health and future of our region, and the need for constructive engagement between all parties, including the state, to solve the problem of vanishing healthcare in rural areas like ours. The gist of Nuvance’s argument is that it is too costly to provide labor and delivery at Sharon Hospital. Given questions raised about both the absolute magnitude of that cost and its relative cost to the system as a whole, and the failure so far of Nuvance to be willing to discuss other options, we need OHS to help enable that engagement.
Hospital systems are not entirely private businesses, for many reasons. They depend on government programs for revenue, and are heavily regulated. Most of the hospital systems in CT (including Nuvance) are nonprofits, so they do not pay taxes that private companies face: in return for that there are standards and expectations that hospitals must meet. Some are clear, some need legislative clarification.
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