What Will the State Health Care Plan Look Like in the Real World?

When legislators and policymakers talk about saving money on health care in Connecticut, Praveen Dhulipalla gets nervous.

Eighteen months ago, he opened the Waterbury Pharmacy on East Main Street in the heart of the city’s downtown. The independent pharmacy—one of about 100 in the state—caters to senior citizens and the growing Hispanic population. Roughly 60 percent of his customers are on state-funded insurance, including Medicaid recipients and public employees and retirees. Many more are on Medicare. Dhulipalla offers them free delivery, personal consultations and convenience. But that doesn’t come cheap: his average cost per prescription, he said, is $11 to $12.

So he worries about the long-term effects of a number of proposals swirling around Hartford this year, as Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and the Democratically-controlled General Assembly struggle to cut costs while taking steps toward creating a health care plan, called SustiNet, aimed at bringing coverage to tens of thousands of uninsured state residents within the next few years.

As lawmakers wrestle with the plan’s fine print, Dhulipalla and others wonder: Who’s going to pay? And how much?

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