The state’s health insurance exchange, a key part of federal health reform, is intended to give individuals and small businesses more options for buying insurance. But for many people in Connecticut, the new marketplace might not bring affordable coverage options when it launches in 2014, according to a consultant to the board developing the exchange. […]

It’s never a good day for a public-employee union when any members are implicated in fraud, but Matt O’Connor of CSEA/SEIU Local 2001 did find some good news in the claim that some state employees appeared to have fraudulently obtained disaster aid. The fraud, after all, was discovered by other state employees. “We should be […]

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy disclosed Sunday that 800 state employees obtained federal disaster aid through the state after Tropical Storm Irene, with an undisclosed number suspected of gaining the assistance through fraud. State and federal prosecutors were notified Friday, he said. At an abruptly called news conference at the Capitol, Malloy said that staff at the […]

Two days before Sunday’s publication of a fly-on-the-wall look at a head-spinning first year in office, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy was asked on the way to a press conference if he had last-minute jitters about opening himself to a close, public examination. Conflict is part of the decor. “Noooo,” Malloy said, theatrically drawing out his […]

The Connecticut Supreme Court was asked on Friday to extend the deadline for drawing new congressional districts to Dec. 21, an effort to keep the politically sensitive task in the hands of state legislators.  The legislature’s bipartisan redistricting commission sought the extension after missing its deadline of midnight Wednesday. It unanimously approved new districts for […]

Warning of the “potential failure of an entire system of care east of the river,” state Healthcare Advocate Victoria Veltri has called on the parent company of two eastern Connecticut hospitals and three insurers to resolve their ongoing contract talks. “I’m not picking sides in this debate, but I just think that it has to […]

Connecticut Light & Power Co. was unprepared for the 809,000 outages it faced after an unprecedented Oct. 29 snowstorm, an independent assessment concluded Friday, noting that CL&P’s “worst-case scenario” plan offered little guidance for outages beyond 100,000 customers. In a report delivered to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and a state study panel, Witt Associates of […]

Just four years after the state borrowed $2 billion to shore up the troubled retired teachers’ pension fund, another infusion of state money will be necessary to cope with the hit the fund took during the recession. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s budget office estimated this week that teacher pension-related spending will jump 40 percent over […]

New Haven — Applying to college entails a lot of work trying to juggle all of the separate applications for each school and keeping all of the necessary personal documents organized and accessible. Now imagine applying to several institutions if you have no mailing address, no phone number and no stable home. That’s how Matthew Morgan, […]

Connecticut tracks students through a comprehensive data system, but a report released this week says the state still has a lot of work to disseminate that data in a timely fashion to teachers, parents and principals and to create progress reports for individual students. Thirty-three states currently provide information on student’s past performance and measure […]

Bridgeport — Pam Stewart of Bridgeport’s Mount Aery Baptist Church took the stage, facing a crowd of about 1,500. “I’m going to talk to you about predatory lending,” she said, Wednesday night, leaning into the microphone. “I contacted my bank in October — just to get information about loan re-modification. By March, they had hiked […]

Stamford — With one of every four students at Rogers Elementary School speaking limited English, and their test results showing they are far behind their peers, school officials knew it was time for a new approach. They decided to embrace the foreign language many of their students were speaking and infuse it into the curriculum. […]