Cigna’s fight with pharmacy company is not our fight.

Entrepreneur Robert Patricelli criticized advertisements placed in the Hartford Courant criticizing health insurance giant Cigna. The ads were purchased by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation of Los Angeles. Mr. Patricelli’s opinion piece also appeared in the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper. The ads alarmed him.

Cigna, an international company, possesses the resources to defend itself over an issue involving the cost of drugs. Patricelli, long a figure in the shrinking Hartford business establishment, nevertheless provided an intervention that portrayed Cigna as “our home team — the business version of the Huskies….” It is not. Cigna is a business that attempts to provide a service that consumers will purchase at a price that returns a profit to its shareholders. It is nothing like the Huskies. Its audience is Wall Street, not the people of Connecticut.

Cigna, created by the merger of Connecticut General and Philadelphia-based Insurance Company of North America, designated Connecticut as its corporate headquarters when David Cordani, a Connecticut resident, became its president more than a decade ago. The decision came with a hefty price tag. It was the first of then-Governor Dannel P. Malloy’s First Five corporations to receive hefty state assistance in 2011 as Connecticut’s finances deteriorated and residents endured a series of destructive tax increases. Cigna saw an opportunity to increase its profit and it took it. That’s what businesses do.

Making that profit–and satisfying the intense attention of Wall Street–is how corporations are judged and we are all better for it. Free markets and the innovations that they bring have raised billions around the world out of grinding poverty. The people of a sovereign state need not pick a side based on locations.

Corporations change. Connecticut General was in the forefront of companies abandoning cities when it moved from Hartford to Bloomfield in 1957. Mr. Patricelli highlighted CIGNA’s striking and architecturally significant building as a side note in his explanation of the company’s big old ding dong of a fight with a non-profit operator of pharmacies. At the dawn of the 21st century, Cigna executives were intent on the destruction of that municipal building to make way for a golf course, luxury housing and two undistinguished office buildings.

The Courant led the fight against the demolition of that notable building in the teeth of opposition by Cigna executives and, oddly, Bloomfield officials. In 2000, the company’s director of public relations, Kenneth J. Ferraro, told the New York Times, ”Cigna’s history and tradition is not a building. It’s providing competitively superior value and service from its employees to its customers and shareholders. This development proposal allows us to continue to do this.”

The company abandoned its plan to get rid of the Wilde building. In a blow to preservation, Cigna did sell the modern marvel of design to the north of Wilde building, once the headquarters of Emhart Corporation. It was demolished.

“Executives for Cigna have dismissed the outcry from the architectural community,” the Times reported, “as the inflated opinion of impractical elitists.” It did not feel like it at the time and that has not changed.

Mr. Patricelli tut-tuts AIDS Healthcare Foundation for including an unflattering photo of David Cordani in an ad. No one rises to the top of a large American corporation without knowing how to fight. Cordani is a dab hand with the shiv and the bazooka. If anyone doubts what Cordani is made of, ask the supporters of a misbegotten plan to create an unregulated state-operated health insurance plan (with no reserves). The Cigna chief may or may not have been at the center of defenestrating their heaving dream of competing with Cigna and other health insurance companies under distinctly uneven terms–and making the public the guarantors of their errors.

An unflattering photo? Most Courant readers would not recognize Cordani in any photo, realistic or distorted. He runs a business. We have no need to know what he looks like. Cordani’s $22 million in compensation last year ought to go a long way in repairing any wounded feelings an unflattering photo inflicted.

Space limitations always play a part in opinion pieces. That may explain why Mr. Patricelli did not include a chapter in Cigna’s history in Connecticut that still perplexes. When the state’s health insurance exchange under the Affordable Care Act was launched in 2014, Cigna did not participate–and it has not. As of last year, Cigna offered health insurance coverage on the exchanges of 16 states.

The company is free to choose where it will offer its products. Regrettably, it chooses year after year not to offer them in Connecticut to its neighbors who need help to afford health insurance.

“When distant third parties unfairly attack one of our state’s major companies and its CEO,” Mr. Patricelli writes, “we should all push back.” When one our state’s major companies and its CEO decline year after year to lend a hand to their fellow residents through the health care exchange, we should all push back on that, too, because it is part of the Cigna story in Connecticut, too.

Published August 22, 2023.