The Covid-19 pandemic ravaged people’s mental health — but may also have opened a door to fix a longstanding mental health problem.
So said State Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney. He hopes to see the legislature seize the chance this session to walk through that door.
Looney, who represents parts of New Haven and Hamden, vowed to tackle that challenge during an appearance Thursday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
Looney appeared on the program to list his priorities for the upcoming legislative session, which begins Feb. 9. Looney has made a practice of coming on the program at the beginning of each session to broadcast his agenda, then return at year’s end to offer a scorecard. (Click here to read about how he fared in 2021, when legalized recreational marijuana use and sports betting became law in Connecticut.)
Because this is an even-numbered year (meaning legislators want more time to run for reelection rather than legislate), the session ends on May 4, lasting just 12 weeks. That means there’s less time to pass new laws. Still, Looney offered a menu of goals he hopes to tackle. They include:
• Making it easier for people to obtain mental health help.
The pandemic, which increased the need for counseling, brought into relief how hard that can be, especially for people without extra money lying around, Looney noted. The reason: many therapists choose not to accept insurance, because of low reimbursements and/or mind-numbing paperwork.
“We’re not saying the problems suddenly appeared in 2020,” but rather that more people noticed them, especially for children, and therefore momentum might build to address the problem.
A task force is currently studying the problem, with an eye to offering specific proposals for Looney and company to offer this session. Looney said Thursday he doesn’t want to get ahead of that process, but does envision having the state require insurance companies increase reimbursements for patients’ therapy visits and seek to create some alternative mental-health insurance plans. That could be a start toward tackling a “complex issue.”
Long term, it may require “some form of public option” — meaning a government-insurance alternative to private insurance — to make mental health care widely accessible, since insurance companies complain they can’t make enough profit in that area, Looney suggested. But he said that question may have to wait for a longer session in another year.
• Helping cities and towns pay for special education.
Right now municipalities don’t receive reimbursement for dollars spent on special education until their per-pupil spending level rises to four and a half times that of their overall state education grant. That’s often leaving cities and towns drowning in expenses to meet a growing demand for services.
Looney proposes setting up a tiered system, similar to the one created in 2021 for the state Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) program, to reimburse hardest-hit communities more: By, for instance, allowing those with greatest need to qualify once they hit double, rather than 4.5 times, their state per-pupil grants.
A second idea: Reward towns that agree to regionalize their school systems with greater special-ed reimbursement. Looney for decades has advocated “the holy grail of regionalization,” of having towns combine some services to cut costs and deliver more efficient service. That has proved a tough sell among the 169 municipalities in “home rule”-oriented Connecticut.
Looney argued that a new opportunity may exist to promote regionalization, for two reasons: The rising special-ed price tag. (“Every town complains that special ed costs are wreaking havoc with their budgets.”) And the results of the 2020 U.S. Census, which showed the school-age population plummeting in smaller communities, especially in eastern Connecticut. That means many unneeded individual local school districts, with separate bureaucracies, should combine to save costs, he argued. He pointed to the 2010 consolidation of probate court districts from 117 to 54 as an example of how it can work well.
• Increasing the earned income tax credit (EITC), which enables lower-wage workers to deduct more money from their annual income tax bills.
Looney over the years successfully fought to create, then build up, the state EITC. Last year he convinced Gov. Ned Lamont to support raising the percentage of income eligible workers can deduct from state taxes from 23 percent to 30.5 percent of the amount they can deduct from the federal version of the EITC. He hopes in 2022 to convince his colleagues, and Lamont, to raise the level to 41.5 percent. The EITC has offered centrist Democrats like Lamont (and, in the day, President Bill Clinton) who want to avoid charges of “raising taxes” on the wealthy to help working families a more politically palatable alternative.
Click on the video at the top of this story to watch the full interview with State Sen. Martin Looney on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven,” in which he also signaled openness to Republican calls for a sales tax cut — with certain conditions — to address inflation.