Comptroller on Savings: It's Never Too Late

At age 38, Connecticut State Comptroller Sean Scanlon thinks a lot about how the state’s older residents can access health care, afford prescription drugs and save for retirement.

As the state’s chief financial officer, he oversees medical, pharmacy and dental benefits for more than 200,000 people — state employees and retirees and their families. His office also oversees MyCTSavings, the state-facilitated retirement savings program for workers of all ages who are self-employed or whose employers don’t offer such a plan.

The Bulletin recently spoke with Scanlon about how the state can help Connecticut’s older adults — and how his mother, who still works full-time in her mid-70s, has helped shape his views.

You’ve worked on issues related to older adults since you were in your mid-20s. What motivated you?

I just think that everybody deserves the dignity of a safe and secure retirement. My parents split up when I was young. My dad died a long time ago and didn’t make it to old age. But my mom is now in her mid-70s. She ran a small business when I was growing up and really struggled financially and was never in a position to save money. So today, she’s still working 9-to-5 every day because she can’t afford to live just on Social Security, and she’s dealing with the cost drivers that are really impacting seniors in Connecticut right now: health care costs, drug costs, energy costs, housing costs, all these things that are making it hard for people.

You’ve said publicly that while you were growing up, your own family often was uninsured or underinsured. How has that influenced your advocacy for health care reform?

I grew up in Guilford. When I was a kid, my earliest memory of learning about our health care system was watching my mom at the Guilford CVS

beg a pharmacist to try to get an alternative drug that maybe was not what the doctor prescribed but could equally help her [and] it was cheaper because she didn’t have insurance on a consistent basis. When I was growing up, I thought this was just about my mom and something she was dealing with. But then I got older and realized that actually a lot of people were dealing with this, too.

I ran for the state House to represent my hometown at a very young age.... I ran for this job in large part because of the massive role that the job plays in health care and my belief that the government can and should use the leverage that it has to make life better for people.

You oversee MyCTSavings, the state-facilitated retirement savings program that now has more than 30,000 employees and 7,000 employers enrolled. What are your plans for the program, and how can it be expanded to more people?

My plan is to just go anywhere, to any town — whether it’s a group of five people or a ballroom of 500 people — and talk about why it’s so important to save for retirement. Because, as I said, my mom didn’t have the financial literacy, right? I’m the first person in my family to ever go to college. My grandparents were amazing people, but they didn’t know the first thing about a stock, and I may be the first person in my family to ever own a stock. So what we need to do as a society is to make sure that everyone has the information they need to succeed. [Connecticut] recently mandated financial literacy as a high school graduation requirement, which I think is a really, really good thing. But what I say to people is it’s never too late to start saving for retirement. MyCTSavings is a plan that is free to any small business with five or more employees in our state.... Whether it’s an auto body shop in Meriden or a 1,000-person biotech company in New Haven, both of those companies can benefit from MyCTSavings.

You mentioned that you’re trying to get younger Connecticut residents enrolled. Why are they so important?

When you’re young and in high school working at your first job — or you’re working your way through college, as I had to do not coming from money — or you get your first job and you’re 21 and you think, “Okay, I’m going to make a lot more money someday. I don’t need to save now.” Every dollar that you can save ... makes a big difference over time, and that money is better utilized earning interest and gaining money in an account than it is just sitting under your couch or in a checking account that really doesn’t get a lot of yield to it. So I just try to go around the state and educate people — again, whether they’re young or they’re older — about the importance of putting money away.

Social Security is a federal program, but how do you see its continued solvency as part of the financial security that Connecticut's retirees are seeking?

Whether it’s Medicare or Social Security, we’ve made a promise to the people of Connecticut and the United States, and I think we have to find a way to keep it.… Medicare and Social Security’s long-term viability is an important problem that I think we’re kind of kicking the can on. So I don’t worry too much about the day-to-day jeopardy of them, although what’s happening in Washington these days is pretty uncertain, and we’re sort of taking things day by day. But I don’t really worry about the problem being a problem for people today. I definitely worry about it being a problem five, 10, 15, 20 years down the road. It is a federal program, but I will do everything in my power to protect the benefits as they currently exist and to work with other colleagues in state government and our legislative delegation in Washington to try to find really meaningful bipartisan solutions to funding this promise that we’ve made.

You’ve worked to increase access to prescription drugs. How do you think costs could be lowered for Connecticut residents?

We have to take a step back and realize that what happens in America with drug prices happens almost nowhere else in the industrialized, Western world. We pay two to three times more for drugs than [they do]. When somebody asks me why, there’s a really easy answer to that, which is that we don’t negotiate the price of drugs. President Biden, in the Inflation Reduction Act, did something that I think is really historic and that often gets overlooked. He changed a law that prohibited Medicare from negotiating for drug prices. So, starting last year and every year going forward, Medicare will negotiate for the price of at least 10 drugs[offered under] Medicare. That will save seniors in Connecticut and this country billions of dollars over the next few years.... And negotiation, from my perspective, is about as American as apple pie, right? That’s about capitalism. Capitalism is about negotiation, getting the best price, and if you don’t offer the best quality product at a good price, then you’re going to go out of business. Well, that doesn’t happen to drug companies because they don’t have any competition…. We need to do that for every drug in America. That has to happen at the federal level, and I hope it does, but here at the state level, we’re not just waiting for Congress to act in a vacuum. We’re trying to do things to actively lower the price of drugs. So in this current [legislative] session, I’m working with the governor to create a cap on the cost of generic drugs — famous drugs like insulin.... It costs about $8 to make a vial of insulin. In some cases, it’s being sold for $300 to $400. So if we can cap the cost of generic drugs at the state level, we can save folks a lot of money.

Your office administers medical, pharmacy and dental benefits for state employees, state retirees and their families. What are some of the biggest challenges facing retirees seeking affordable medical care?

Right now our biggest problem is that for our retiree health care population — which is about 80,000 people — the cost of their plan is going up for two main reasons. Number one: Hospital utilization is really, really high right now. And number two: Drug prices…. Hospital costs are a humongous driver of not just health care costs for seniors, but for everybody. The reason for that is because we are experiencing — and Connecticut is not unique here — a primary care health crisis. If my mom calls her doctor right now and says, “Hey, I feel sick, can I come and see somebody?” They say, “Sure, we’ll see you in mid-May” because we’re facing a massive shortage of not just doctors, but nurses and all sorts of other health care professionals. When someone like my mom or anybody else that is a senior feels sick … they go to places where they know they could get help, even if it’s not the appropriate place for them to get that care. That means they go to hospitals. That means they go to urgent care centers. All those places cost two to three times more than what it would cost in a primary care setting.

Your office recently began a partnership between MyCTSavings and Rhode Island’s retirement savings program. Do you see Connecticut continuing to collaborate with other states?

Yeah. Look, as Washington is sort of stuck in perpetual political gridlock and they can’t really get a lot done, different states are working together to solve challenges, right? ArrayRx is a coalition of red states and blue states trying to lower drug prices. [The program is open to all Connecticut residents; details at arrayrxcard.com.] ... Our partnership with Rhode Island is about lowering the ultimate cost of retiring for our people because the more states that we work with, the lower the fees are on the employee, on their investments. There are no fees on the employer, but there are small fees on the employees, obviously, to finance their investing. So the more states that we can work with — whether they’re red or blue — is a win-win for both their constituents and mine.

Katherine Shaver has been a journalist for more than 30 years, including 26 years at The Washington Post.

Also of interest:

• Show Me the Money: How to Find Unclaimed Assets
• 5 Ways to Slash Your Home's Heating Bills
• 8 Ways to Keep From Going Broke in Retirement