Today’s Courant leads with Rell’s health care plan which focuses on insuring the 400,000 or so uninsured residents of Connecticut. From the Courant:

Rell presented in a press release what she is calling the Charter Oak Health Plan, which would lean heavily on private insurers. Any uninsured adult would have the option of paying no more than $250 a month for basic health care, prescription drugs, laboratory services and pre- and post-natal care. Rell said her plan would cost the state nothing more than nominal administrative and marketing support, and would be the product of collaboration with the managed-care industry.

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Daniel Gross writes in today’s New York Times that after looking at the numbers, we tax payers already pay for healthcare for about half of all U.S. workers. Is this right? He explains:

Out of a total population of about 300 million, 35.6 million elderly Americans were on Medicare in 2005. Of the working-age population, which reached 257.8 million in 2005, some 45.5 million were covered by Medicare, Medicaid or military health programs, according to the benefits institute. An additional 18.2 million workers had health insurance through jobs in the public sector, which includes state, federal and local governments, public schools and state universities, according to Paul Fronstin, director of the institute’s health research and education program. Millions of those workers’ dependents are covered as well. Even if those dependents are not included in the tally, taxpayers paid the bill for almost two-fifths of all Americans with insurance in 2005.

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