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Pervasiveness is a strength of Governor Lamont's campaign for re-election, since he has so much of his own money to spend on it, but coherence is not.
The governor's campaign commercials emphasize his support for "affordable health care for everyone" but don't specify what that means.
Does it mean "Medicare for all"? If it does, that's something for the federal government to arrange, something beyond state government's control.
Does it mean extending state government's employee insurance to private employers and individuals? That is theoretically possible but implausible insofar as it would be spectacularly expensive, and the first obligation of any supporter of such legislation would be to say where the money would come from. (Would it come from more de-facto borrowing against state government's pension funds, pushing their obligations deeper into the future? That is how state government continues to finance itself.)
In any case a state government medical insurance system that was truly universal would risk attracting to Connecticut every medically needy person from around the country and even the world, much as California's medical insurance for illegal immigrants has swamped that state financially and much as Connecticut's making itself a "sanctuary state" has drawn illegal immigrant social costs here.
Medical insurance is a problem that could be solved reasonably well only nationally, but being honest and coherent about it would not make a 30-second commercial as upbeat as the governor's commercials that merely hope for nice things.
Last week the governor's campaign doubled down on the medical insurance issue with a commercial featuring his running mate, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz. She says she and the governor want to make big corporations like Amazon reimburse state government for the medical insurance the state gives to employees of big corporations who don't receive medical insurance benefits.
That state medical insurance is the kind given to the indigent. It may be "affordable" but it's not very good. It is mainly more scaffolding for the country's current system of tying people's medical insurance to their employers, a system that inevitably provides grossly unequal levels of insurance, some decent, some not.
Besides, the Bysiewicz commercial's attack on Amazon is misplaced, since the company provides comprehensive medical insurance not just to full-time employees but also to many part-timers. While many other part-time Amazon workers -- those with sharply limited hours, along with the company's seasonal workers -- don't qualify for medical insurance benefits, of course that is common practice throughout the country.
Unlike government, which can always create as much money as it wants and finance itself with inflation and currency devaluation, businesses large and small survive financially only if they fix an accurate relationship between the value produced by employee labor and its cost. As public education continues to decline, many people enter the workforce without the skills necessary to do work whose value covers both the wages they need and the medical insurance they'd like, what with medical insurance growing more expensive.
Most businesses, large and small, don't provide medical insurance to part-time and seasonal workers. Some businesses would go broke if they were required to. They're not evil; they are living in the real world every day, unlike government, which, comfortable in its powers of money creation and cost shifting, inhabits the real world only occasionally.
Making Amazon pay a penalty for its uninsured part-time and seasonal workers will do nothing for Connecticut's un- and underinsured. Advocating such a penalty is just more scapegoating and demagoguery posing as liberalism.
Maybe the best thing Connecticut could do on its own to ensure that more people have good medical insurance would be to ensure that more of its children got decent educations instead of just social promotion in school.
While the Democratic campaign commercials prattled this month about affordable health care, the Connecticut Business and Industry Association reminded the state that its manufacturers have 86,000 job openings for skilled workers, jobs offering good salaries and insurance. But it's hard for the manufacturers to find such workers, since Connecticut's schools don't produce enough.
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