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Almanac
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Business New Haven
12/13/1999
By: BNH
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Unhealthy Home Care
The number of home-care agencies in Connecticut continues to drop precipitously. According to the Connecticut Association for Home Care, over the past 18 months, fully 24 percent of companies in the home-care business - or 32 companies in all - "surrendered state licenses for home care." Of that number, half consolidated and the other half went out of business. Nationwide over the same time span about 2,700 companies closed. Medicare claims dropped 38 percent, from $16.7 billion in 1997 to $10.5 billion last year. Visits nationally fell by 40 percent from 1997 to '98, with 500,000 fewer Medicare beneficiaries served.
Don't Tread on Us
The Connecticut Business & Industry Association (CBIA) is urging state lawmakers not to act "hastily" by revising sales tax laws with regard to e-commerce. In written testimony presented during the Department of Revenue Services' Summit on Electronic Commerce last month, CBIA Vice President for Legislative Affairs Joseph F. Brennan said the state's largest business organization "believes that the threat of significant revenue loss caused by the Internet is overstated at this time, and that the threat does not warrant any action on the state level." Brennan noted that even as the number of electronic transactions has grown rapidly in Connecticut in recent years, sales and use tax receipts have increased above projections. "State actions now that will hurt our efforts to be an e-commerce-friendly state will have a detrimental impact on tax revenues that expanding economic opportunities could provide," Brennan said.
By Their Scrod, Ye Shall Know Them
We have the Connecticut Seafood Council to thank for the news that Connecticut residents consume seafood at about twice the national rate. Nutmeggers last year downed an average of one ounce of seafood per person per day - about 22.8 pounds per capita annually. In 1998, Connecticut "harvesters" landed more than 17.6 million pounds of seafood with an ex-vessel value of more than $34.4 million. Moreover, commercial fisheries for shellfish, lobster and finfish generate some $150 million in economic activity in Connecticut each year. Just thought you'd like to know….
Feeling Their Pain
U.S. teaching hospitals received some $17 billion in relief aid as part o a package signed into law November 29 by President Clinton. Which is nice - but far short of what Yale-New Haven Hospital and others will need to balance their budgets. Medicare cuts stemming from the 1997 federal Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) plunged many hospitals into a sea of red ink, including YNHH, which before the new relief measure projected a loss of $101 million over five years. That projected loss now stands at $96 million. The new act freezes the BBA's reductions in the Medicare Indirect Medical Education and Disproportionate Share Hospital payments, as well as reforms the outpatient prospective payment system. "The relief," as YNHH Administrative Director for Community and Government Relations Kyle Ballou told the Yale Daily News, "falls far short of what we need."
Honey, I Shrunk the Fund Balance
Nobody knows yet whether computers, bad accounting or dastardly deeds are responsible, but the town of Seymour has seen its estimated fund balance shrink from an estimated $5.7 million surplus in 1997 to a current deficit of $2.2 million. A financial software company has been blamed for a computer glitch causing a $1.5 million miscalculation of expected tax revenues. But there's plenty of extra blame to go around, starting with the town's professional finance director, Art Davies, who in turn blames the finance board and board of selectmen for deliberately overspending. Then there's the question of under whose watch did the shortfall occur: Former first selectman John O'Toole, who resigned in mid-August to take a job with Northeast Utilities, or interim first selectman Frank Conroy, whose term expired December 5? (Republican Scott Barton, who was inaugurated the following day, may well wish he had kept his day job.) Now the town has commissioned a three-month, $45,000 "special audit" to sort out the mess and find out who is responsible for what. "If it wasn't for that shortfall there would have been a surplus," O'Toole observed. And how.
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