Connecticut’s Early Childhood Education Endowment Advisory Board had a special meeting on Monday, May 18, to discuss health care plans and possible subsidies for early childhood education (ECE) workers.
ECE workers are often low-income earners, which has an impact on the health care plans they can afford. There is a mismatch between the cost of providing ECE services and the amount families are willing to pay. The average ECE employee in Connecticut makes between $16.94, which is the minimum wage, and $18.20 per hour, or around $35,000 to $38,000 every year, according to a study commissioned by Access Health CT and carried out by Wakely Consulting.
According to Monette Ferguson, Executive Director of the Alliance for Community Empowerment, many daycare workers, even at large facilities, struggle to afford basic first aid materials, like Band-Aids and hydrogen peroxide, in their personal homes.
Wakely Consulting surveyed 2,100 employees and seven large companies for their study. According to one of Wakely’s Consulting Actuaries, Ren Zhong, this sample size was not large enough to draw definitive conclusions about ECE workers, so the survey Wakely conducted was supplemented with rate filings, public survey results, and industry publications for the report. The consulting firm also used a range of incomes and costs to be more accurate.
Even though this income level is 220% to 240% higher than the federal poverty line (FPL), it is less than the cost of living in Connecticut. One adult, living alone in Connecticut, with no children, needs to earn $26.05 an hour, or around $54,000 a year, to keep up with the cost of living, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator. If that adult has a partner and a child, then each adult needs to earn around $59,000 to keep pace with the cost of living.
“When you get into… consumers with income of 200 or 250% of the FPL, the federal subsidies are still pretty generous, even though the (Affordable Care Act) enhanced subsidies expired, at the lower end of the income spectrum,” said Access Health CT’s Director of Legal and Government Affairs Susan Rich-Bye.
Pandemic-era enhanced premium subsidies for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) expired at the end of 2025. These subsidies expanded coverage for people who made up to 400% of the FPL.
Out of the 31,000 people who work in ECE Connecticut, 82% have some sort of health insurance, the study found. One-fifth of all ECE workers are insured through their employer, 17% are on Access Health CT Individual Marketplace plans, 15% are on Medicaid or Husky Health, 2% are on Medicare, and 28% of ECE workers get their insurance through their spouse, partner, or another source.
As for the 18% of workers without any form of health insurance, most of them work for “mom and pop” childcare centers who cannot afford, and are not required to offer, health insurance for their employees, according to Rich-Bye.
“Under the ACA, large employers… are required to offer an affordable health insurance program,” Rich-Bye said. “It has to be affordable, and then it has to provide minimum value coverage.”
A large employer is defined as an employer with at least 50 full-time employees. If one of their employees opts to get their insurance from Medicaid, rather than from the company or their spouse, then the employer has to pay a fee. This serves as an incentive for large employers to offer health insurance plans that are better than public options, according to Rich-Bye.
Access Health CT proposed five possible plans that could be implemented independently or concurrently.
One plan would provide subsidies to ESE employees with Health Savings Account (HSA)-compliant health insurance plans to offset high deductibles, and another would provide subsidies in the form of payments directly to the health carriers for people who did not have HSA plans. Another plan is to promote Access Health CT Business Plus to support employer-sponsored coverage, and the last two plans were subsidies paid directly to ECE workers—one is an income-based subsidy, and the other is a universal subsidy.
The Advisory Board will have to make a final decision on health care plans by June 30.
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