Some 17.1 percent of the uninsured in Utah reported poor or fair health status, compared to 8 percent of the insured population, the report found.

Hatch and Wyden believe that "to improve the health-care system, the American public must engage in an informed national public debate to make choices about the services they want covered, what health-care coverage they want and how they are willing to pay for coverage," according to information provided about their legislation.

In February, the Government Accountability Office named a 15-member citizen's "working group" to examine how the $1.8 trillion now spent annually on health care is truly allocated. The working group will then lead a national discussion online and in town hall meetings about whether and how the current healthcare system should be changed.

All congressional committees that address health-care issues will then hold hearings on the findings, Hatch said.

Wyden said such a bipartisan approach has never been tried before, but he also knows the current way of trying to reform health care has failed for the past 60 years.

"From President Truman to President Clinton, health-care reform has been pushed on the American people from inside the beltway in Washington, D.C.," Wyden said. "Legislation was written in Washington, D.C., the American people found it incomprehensible, powerful special interest groups attacked it and each other, and the effort always collapsed."

"Real health-care reform will come from the people, not bureaucrats in Washington," Hatch said earlier this year.

The process could take a couple of years, but organizers of the Cover the Uninsured Week, supported by former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and nine former surgeons general, are taking the issue directly to Americans through a series of campus seminars, interfaith activities, business and health fairs and other events in an effort to create a public dialogue that gets the attention of lawmakers in Washington.

Nationally, 45 million Americans, 8 million of them children, are uninsured.

"There is no responsible reason for not acting," said Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, who praised Hatch and Wyden for their bipartisanship on the issue. "Years of research and policy development tell us that mechanism for securing coverage for all are neither mysterious nor beyond our reach."

And, she added, "Our country desperately needs less partisan positioning and more cooperation on health care."

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