DAILY NEWS CLIP: June 3, 2025

Major health insurance, prescription drugs-related bill dead in CT legislature for this year


Hartford Business Journal – Monday, June 2, 2025
By David Krechevsky

Senate Bill 11 is dead.  The massive bill sought to address the affordability of prescription drugs in the state, but also contained a section on stop-loss insurance policies that was vehemently opposed by business organizations.

The bill was on the agenda for the May 27 meeting of the state legislature’s Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee but it was not called before the meeting adjourned. The committee met Monday for the first time since that meeting, but only to vote on revenue estimates.

Rep. Maria Horn (D-Salisbury), the committee’s co-chair, confirmed that SB 11 is now dead in an email to Hartford Business Journal.

She said the lack of action by her committee killed the bill.

“Our cognizance over referred bills is generally limited to fiscal issues (and not underlying policy),” she stated in the email. “This bill came to us with a fiscal note of ‘at least $97 million’ in FY ‘26, and ‘at least $185 million’ in FY ‘27. Neither of these numbers have been included in the budget, to my knowledge, so it made no sense to me to advance the bill.”

The Connecticut Business & Industry Association is among the organizations that opposed one part of the bill, known as Section 12 in its final version.

CBIA President and CEO Chris DePentima said the bill would only make employer health insurance more expensive.

Essentially the bill, among other things, would require employers offering self-funded health plans to cover more of the costs of benefit claims (up to $250,000 instead of the current $20,000 level) before stop-loss insurance kicks in.

CBIA has said that half of the state’s small businesses now provide self-funded health plans to their employees.

“Policy drives behavior,” DiPentima said, adding that he believed SB 11 would “drive a behavior that will continue this ‘death spiral,’ where fewer and fewer businesses will offer health insurance.”

ConnectiCare, Aetna, Cigna/Oscar Health and nonprofit Harvard Pilgrim HealthCare have all exited the state’s small group health insurance market since 2022. That leaves just two carriers — Anthem and UnitedHealthcare — providing fully insured plans to small employers

In addition, according to an analysis released in April by health benefits tech company Take Command, the share of Connecticut small businesses offering health insurance to their employees has fallen nearly 25% since 2009, the largest decline in the nation.

Sen. Matthew Lesser (D-Middletown), co-chair of the Human Services Committee, had said last week that he believed some parts of the bill could be resurrected before the 2025 legislative session ends Wednesday night.

“The heart of the bill is a bipartisan consensus package of reforms to address drug affordability,” Lesser said. “That remains a priority item. Conversations have continued without any interruption, and we’re committed to finding a way to get the policy done. Obviously, time is short, but it’s a priority, I think, for Democrats and Republicans in the legislature and I’m hoping we can get to ‘yes.’”

Access this article at its original source.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act Designated Agent Contact Information:

Communications Director, Connecticut Hospital Association
110 Barnes Road, Wallingford, CT
rall@chime.org, 203-265-7611