On Tuesday, a passing motorist noticed black smoke billowing from the top of The Courant building in Hartford and called 9-1-1, prompting a visit to the newspaper’s offices from the Hartford Fire Department.  It turned out to be a false alarm.  The good samaritan’s call probably should have referenced the other side of the street, toward the Capitol, where our State’s fiscal house continues to burn.

The state budget crisis continues to spiral out of control, with state officials reporting a collapse in revenue and a current fiscal year budget deficit that could be up to $1 billion.  The out-years are projected to run nearly $6 billion into the red, with a $2.6 billion deficit next year and $3.3 billion after that.  Receipts are all down from the income tax, sales tax, and a host of the other taxes.

Adding to the misery is the string of bad press releases coming almost daily out of one CT business after another, from Aetna to UST, as they send their jobs out of the state.

What has been the response been to this crisis from the two sides of the ideological divide? 

At the same time that smoke was rolling off the roof of the Courant building, organized labor a makeshift coalition of Democrats were rolling out “SustiNet“, a slickly re-packaged plan for the State to take over health care delivery in Connecticut, while GOP Governor M. Jodi Rell was working for free and ordering her agency commissioners to follow suit.

Governor M. Jodi Rell

The Governor and her Republican colleagues in the State House and Senate have shown themselves, in the midst of this budget crisis, to be the few people acting like adults at the Capitol.  

Gov. Rell has called on the Legislature to control spending, address structural costs, and shrink the size of government down to its core functions.  Republican leaders in the House and Senate yesterday called for legislators to take a pay cut.  It was rejected on party line votes.

The Democrats have resisted the GOP efforts to reduce spending at every turn because they have been busy plotting to spend even more money to have the State takeover health care delivery.  The ‘SustiNet’ plan unveiled on Tuesday would require $950 million in new spending, a $90 million “shared responsibility” tax on certain businesses, and a theoretical $800 million increase in federal aid.

There is no doubt that we need to do something about health care in this State.  It’s expensive, complicated, and often ridiculous.  The ‘SustiNet’ proposal has a number of very intriguing components – electronic medical records, “patient-centered medical homes”, etc. – that make it compelling.

But the plan uses obviously poll-tested buzzwords like “competition”, “public-private partnership”, and ”coverage choice” for a reason – it’s a little sugar to get people to swallow the bitter pill of centrally-planned health care. 

They advertise the plan as one that will merely compete with private health insurance, but state-run health care plans are only accountable to the bureaucrats that created it, not shareholders.  They don’t pay taxes and don’t have to market their product because of forced enrollment.

But perhaps the biggest question that should be addressed before state government chooses to spend $1.7 billion – mind you, money it doesn’t have - for a wholesale overhaul of the health care system concerns why we don’t try lower cost alternatives first. 

Why can’t we, for example, reform the government mandates that artificially inflate the cost of health insurance?  Hospital mergers reduce competition and eliminate choices for consumers while driving up the price – something state government could play a key role in fixing.  These policy changes would have a positive effect on affordability and access while costing the state far, far less than $1.7 billion it doesn’t have.

And really, this is the crux of the entire debate.  Despite the billions of dollars in deficits, Democrats want to experiment with new big government solutions to problems at least partially created by the last set of big government solutions, while the Governor and her allies in the Legislature are doing everything they can, short only of burning down the Capitol, just to balance the books.

Of course, where there is smoke . . .