Last week's post on Connecticut hospitals' temper tantrum elicited no public comments but quite a few private ones. Several payers were rather upset that their bill repricing/network vendors have not been applying the laws correctly, resulting in higher payments than the law requires.

The issue of 'fiduciary responsibility' and liability therefore came up a time or two...

One person familiar with the State employee workers comp program confirmed that the State is paying Yale-New Haven and its affiliated hospitals billed charges (or something close to), while paying other facilities about 30-35% less than billed charges. That corrects my misstatement in last week's post that implied the state was paying facilities their billed charges. That said, the state is still paying (somewhat) more than it legally must. Like most states CT is in a bit of a budget crunch, with the Governor and legislature looking for cuts to make up a $300 million deficit.

Workers comp costs for State employees are around $80 million a year; that doesn't include municipalities and school boards which are covered through the towns (there are over 110 towns in CT).