The email is sitting in my inbox like a countdown clock: $5,000 due to secure my surgery date. Another $7,000 required on the day of the procedure. Before even getting there, I had already paid $800 just for a consultation and thousands more from emergency room visits, trying to manage the pain.

As a college student in a single-parent household, these costs are not just overwhelming; they are destabilizing. For my family, this isn’t just a medical decision; it’s a financial crisis that affects bills, groceries, and basic stability. 

This isn’t an unusual story; it’s what accessing healthcare looks like for too many people in Connecticut today. When the cost of care becomes this overwhelming, patients are forced to make impossible choices: delay treatment, go into debt, or simply go without. 

This is why Connecticut lawmakers must pass SB3: An Act Concerning Health Care Affordability. The bill directly addresses one of the most urgent public health issues in our state: the rising cost of healthcare and the barriers it creates for everyday citizens. SB3 is not just a general attempt to “lower costs.” It proposes specific, actionable solutions.

The bill would establish a Connecticut Affordable Health Care Trust Fund to stabilize costs and protect residents from rising premiums, particularly as federal subsidies become uncertain. It also includes a “Connecticut Option” program designed to expand access to more affordable insurance coverage and, in the short term, replace federal premium subsidies for many residents earning up to 600% of the federal poverty level. 

Healthcare affordability is not just an economic issue; it is a public health crisis. According to a report from theKaiser Family Foundation, nearly half of U.S. adults report difficulty affording healthcare, and many delay or skip necessary services as a result. These delays can lead to worsening conditions, more emergency visits, and higher long-term costs for both patients and the healthcare system. In my case, postponing treatment for endometriosis only led to repeated ER visits, each one adding to the financial and physical burden.  

Ella Nocera-DeJulio

Connecticut is not immune to these trends. Reports show that residents across the state, especially those with low and moderate incomes, struggle with high premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs. Even those with insurance often face significant financial barriers when seeking care. This reality contradicts the very purpose of a healthcare system: to provide timely, effective treatment without causing financial harm.

Some critics argue that bills like SB3 could increase government spending or place additional strain on healthcare providers. Others question whether it goes far enough, pointing out gaps in coverage, such as limited inclusion of certain populations. These concerns deserve attention, but they do not outweigh the urgency of the problem. In fact, SB3 is designed as both a short-term solution to stabilize costs and a long-term framework to explore broader reforms.

Passing SB3 would help more than just individual patients. When people can afford regular checkups and early treatment, long-term illnesses are easier to manage, fewer people end up in the emergency room, and healthcare costs go down overall. This leads to healthier communities and a better-functioning healthcare system. In simpler terms, making healthcare more affordable isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s also a smart decision.

My experience is just one example, but it reflects a much larger issue affecting communities across Connecticut. No one should have to delay a necessary surgery or accumulate thousands of dollars in debt just to receive basic medical care. Healthcare shouldn’t be something only available to people who can afford it, but a basic right supported by strong and effective policies.

Connecticut has a real chance to fix a system that is clearly not working for many people. Passing SB3 would help lower costs and make it easier for residents to get the care they need without financial stress. It’s time for lawmakers to take action and make healthcare more affordable and accessible for everyone. 

Ella Nocera-DeJulio is a sophomore at Sacred Heart University, majoring in Health Sciences, concentrating in Occupational Therapy.

Connecticut sat out most of the suburban-era tear-down that reshaped New England, and the smaller towns kept hold of specific, improbable things that anywhere else would have been paved over by 1975. A 1769 ferry still crossing the river on schedule. A 1784 law school, the country’s first, still standing as a museum. A pink Gothic cottage with the original 1846 boxwood parterre in the yard. A stone castle built by the actor who made the curved Sherlock Holmes pipe famous on stage. A 1752 house where George Washington and Rochambeau actually sat down and mapped out Yorktown. These six towns are where that kind of specificity survives, and where walking a block still puts you next to the real thing.

Litchfield

Litchfield’s claim to national history is that Judge Tapping Reeve started teaching law out of his home here in 1784, making this the site of the country’s first formal law school. Reeve taught Aaron Burr, two future Vice Presidents, a hundred and one members of Congress, and enough Supreme Court justices that the graduate roster reads like a founding-era directory. The Tapping Reeve House and the adjoining Law School, now a museum, are exactly where they were.

The rest of the town played to that register. Litchfield was a Revolutionary War supply hub and later an abolitionist center. The Litchfield History Museum fills in the wider picture, with rotating exhibits on local industry, abolition, and 18th-century domestic life. For an afternoon outside, the White Memorial Conservation Center sits on the edge of town with more than 4,000 acres of woods, meadow, and trail, and Bantam Lake, the largest natural lake in the state, is minutes south. The Litchfield Hills Farm-Fresh Market draws a Saturday crowd at the Litchfield Firehouse, just outside the Historic District and its 18th-century buildings.

Old Saybrook

Katharine Hepburn grew up summering in Old Saybrook and kept a house on Fenwick Point until her death in 2003. The Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center, known locally as “The Kate,” now occupies the 1911 former town hall and runs a full theater calendar built around her memory. That is only the most famous thread in a town that has been here since 1635, when Old Saybrook was chartered at the mouth of the Connecticut River as an independent colony before folding into the Connecticut Colony in 1644.

Fort Saybrook Monument Park covers the original fortification site. Saybrook Point opens up wide water views across the river mouth, and Harvey’s Beach shallows out gently enough for families to wade in. Come late June, the Celebrate Saybrook Street Party shuts down Main Street for live music and food vendors.

Wethersfield

The room where Yorktown got planned is on the second floor of the Joseph Webb House, at the north end of Main Street. In May 1781, George Washington rode into town with a small staff, met French General Rochambeau at the Webb House, and the two of them sat there for five days working out the campaign that would end the Revolutionary War five months later. The house has been here since 1752 and still looks essentially as it did that week.

Wethersfield claims the title of Connecticut’s “most ancient town” and dates its founding to 1634. The Old Wethersfield Historic District holds more than 300 historic houses, around 50 of them built before the Revolution, which is a lot by American standards. The Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum tours three of them on adjacent lots: the 1752 Webb House, the 1769 Silas Deane House, and the 1789 Isaac Stevens House, each staged to a different period. The Keeney Memorial Cultural Center fills a red-brick Victorian building with local artifacts. September brings CornFest at Cove Park, where Wethersfield Cove also handles the kayak and waterfront walk traffic the rest of the year.

Chester

The Chester-Hadlyme Ferry has been pushing across the Connecticut River since 1769, and it still runs a seasonal schedule of short crossings between the two banks. When you board, you are stepping onto Connecticut’s second-oldest continuously operating ferry, behind only the Rocky Hill-Glastonbury Ferry, which has been running since 1655. The ride is short, five to ten minutes depending on the current, and the river views frame Gillette Castle on the ridgeline across the water.

The rest of Chester grew up around industry: the town was incorporated in 1836 and turned out ivory combs, bits, and augers during the Industrial Revolution. The small downtown is a lived-in two-block stretch, best in summer and early fall when the Chester Sunday Market sets up with produce, baked goods, and live music. Cedar Lake, just outside the village, handles the swim-and-paddleboard side of the weekend.

Woodstock

The house that anchors Woodstock is Pepto-Bismol pink. Built in 1846 for New York publisher Henry Chandler Bowen, Roseland Cottage was an early and very loud piece of Gothic Revival architecture, complete with gabled rooflines, stained glass, and an original boxwood parterre garden laid out in the same year. Presidents from Grant to McKinley showed up for Fourth of July parties here. The cottage is now a National Historic Landmark open for tours, and the pink still looks right.

Settled in 1686, Woodstock occupies Connecticut’s northeastern “Quiet Corner” and butts up against Massachusetts. Woodstock Academy, founded in 1801, is among the oldest secondary schools in the state and still holds classes in several of its 19th-century buildings. Woodstock Orchards and Bakery Barn keep the pick-your-own and cider-donut traditions running. The Labor Day weekend Woodstock Fair, running since 1860, is one of the largest in the state, and the Air Line State Park Trail, built on an old rail bed, handles the hiking and biking.

East Haddam

William Gillette was the actor who did more than anyone to define Sherlock Holmes on stage, and his version of the detective lent the curved calabash pipe to a century of pop culture imagery. (The deerstalker came earlier, from Sidney Paget’s Strand Magazine illustrations.) What Gillette did with the royalties is Gillette Castle, a 24-room fieldstone medieval-style mansion he designed himself and built between 1914 and 1919 on a bluff over the Connecticut River. The house is full of personal eccentricities: 47 hand-carved doors, each with a unique wooden latch; a sliding table on rails; a system of mirrors he used to see who was at the front door without leaving the parlor. Gillette Castle State Park opens the house and grounds to the public.

East Haddam was founded in 1734 along the river. The Goodspeed Opera House, completed in 1877, still puts on musical theater. The venue has sent 21 productions to Broadway, including the world premieres of Annie, Man of La Mancha, and Shenandoah. The Nathan Hale Schoolhouse is the one-room building where the Revolutionary War hero taught before enlisting. Chapman Falls drops about 60 feet through Devil’s Hopyard State Park, a short drive north. The East Haddam Swing Bridge, built in 1913 and recently reopened after a major repair, is the kind of thing you photograph before crossing.

The Final Word

A pattern holds across these six: the thing that matters is still exactly where it always was. Washington and Rochambeau’s table is still upstairs at the Webb House. The 1769 ferry is still hauling cars across the river. Tapping Reeve’s law office is still standing next to the house. Gillette is still rigging his 47 doors for a century-old audience. Connecticut’s smaller towns never let the specific get replaced with the generic, and that is the whole reason to go.

On paper, Connecticut is economically thriving – jobs are at an all-time high with over 1.7 million positions in the state, as reported by the state Department of Labor (DOL). With over 5,000 jobs added for the month of January in various industries, as well as a projected surplus upwards of over $164.5 million for the Fiscal Year 2026, it’s a promising trajectory for our state and should demonstrate that Connecticut labor is as strong as it’s ever been. 

But while it’s true that from an economic standpoint Connecticut is doing well, I look to our workers —our everyday people— to truly determine how successful we are at meeting our residents’ needs. 

And right now, there are significant problems in our state that need to be addressed, from the well-known crisis in affordability to the seemingly intractable limits faced by many low-wage, hourly workers in scheduling and organizing that are so longstanding, they may seem invisible.  

But there are also problems that thousands of Connecticut workers face that we can easily tackle in this session. At the top of that list is the issue faced by contracted workers, most of them building cleaners, who regularly lose good jobs without any fair reason or fair warning.   

Throughout my life of advocating for safer, fair, and just workplaces, I am constantly met with the same recurring issue: new contractors who waltz in and completely usurp the status quo, terminating the jobs and upending the lives of workers who preceded them, no matter how long or how well they’d served the building’s occupants. Often, this happens once a building is sold or there is a transition in management, which results in the replacement of the building’s entire workforces.  

The people whose lives are upended are often parents, spouses, and caretakers who have performed the job for decades, workers with unmatchable institutional knowledge. Such abrupt terminations can also result in a loss of health insurance and other benefits, a psychological shock that is worsened by the turbulence of war, tripling inflation, and Connecticut’s already high cost of living. 

I’ve worked alongside several unions in Connecticut, as well as worked for a few myself prior to becoming state senator, and I have seen this shock issued by new contractors and building owners again and again. In 2024, I fought alongside 14 former custodians at ARKA group who were abruptly displaced when the company hired a nonunion contractor. It took over a year for many of these workers to get backpay for lost wages, and for some of them to return to their original postings.  

I’m seeing this again in Norwalk with the most recent grievance being handled by building service worker union 32BJ, part of the Service Employees International Union. Elsa Guerrero and Corina Palacio, two part-time workers who were recently let go by a new cleaning contractor who took over at 40 Richards Avenue in Norwalk.  

In the case of Elsa, in particular, the toll of losing her only source of income has been almost crippling. With her job, she was supporting a sister back home in Peru with a delicate health condition, and she is now left reeling, wondering how her sister will manage. For Corina, this was one of two part-time jobs she was working to make ends meet to support her and her child. However, with only one job now and daily expenses that keep adding up, the impact of her termination grows larger everyday. 

These are the real costs of companies terminating employees abruptly when taking over a new worksite.  

It is because of these situations that we’re urging the passage of effective, statewide worker’s retention laws in Connecticut, S.B. 358 and H.B. 5003. Both of these bills directly address this issue by protecting workers’ jobs for 90 days following a contractor change at their worksite, giving the worker time to find new work and the employer time to consider the value that worker brings to the worksite, without ending their right to ultimately hire whomever they choose.  

As it currently stands in Connecticut, workers employed by building-service contractors have no legal right to keep their jobs if their owner decides to replace the workforce. With proper worker’s retention laws in place, workers are given some agency. 

Connecticut would not be the first to establish such a framework; states like New Jersey, California, and Delaware share that honor. However, there has never been a more important time for a worker’s retention bill. 

We have an obligation as lawmakers do all that’s possible to support workers like Elsa and Corina by giving them access to a resource whose value is often incalculable –- time. 

State Sen. Julie Kushner of the 24th District is Deputy President Pro Tempore and represents Danbury and portions of New Fairfield and Ridgefield.