CBIA and the Chamber of Commerce - Incestuous Manipulation for the Wealthy

Connecticut Business and Industry Association and the Chamber of Commerce – Incestuous Manipulation for the Wealthy

While it doesn’t keep me up at night, I must admit that the gross manipulation of the political process by the likes of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association (“CBIA”) and the Chambers of Commerce is insidious. Organizationally, the CBIA is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s state affiliate. They think that they can misrepresent facts to political agencies and the public without any consequence.

Last week I received the “CBIA News”, a periodic Journal published by the CBIA. This propaganda tools is used for the ostensible purpose of communicating to CBIA members and who knows who else about issues currently relevant in the public domain. The lead article in the February 2007 edition was an article entitled “Improving health care quality”, certainly a noble venture. Ironically, the CBIA has long teamed up with the Connecticut Medical Society and local medical groups like the Fairfield County Medical Society conniving to find ways to make health care professionals less accountable for their wrongdoing. In doing so the CBIA has fostered a system that was guaranteed to worsen the quality of health care often by using scare tactics to forestall meaningful reform.

So now CBIA is looking for political cover to make it look like it’s a good citizen when in reality, the probability is that CBIA and the Chambers of Commerce are now teaming together to find a way to cut employer expenses on the backs of hospitals, physicians who are underpaid and over-papered. The article boasts that CBIA has become part of a coalition called the Connecticut Health Insurance Policy Council. Part of its goal appears to be the implementation of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services effort to encourage employers to support health care quality and cost reporting to employees. So which employers does the CBIA refer to in this article? Electric Boat; Boehringer Ingelheim. Aetna; General Electric, Pitney Bowes; United Technologies, Xerox and Cigna – fairly representative of Connecticut’s business environment. Certainly what’s good for these employers must be good for the average employer in Ansonia or Bridgeport.