Utah Issues held a Poverty Solutions Conference this past week to address the increasing needs of our community and specifically the problem of insufficient health insurance coverage.

The conference, hosted particularly by Dr. David Sundwall of Utah's Health Department and Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert, was anything but solution focused. While discussing the rampant failure Utah is facing with preventing poverty and providing health care for its citizens, the panel of experts repeatedly spouted excuse after excuse for the problems in our state while demonstrating a complete disconnect to our communities and their plight.

As the group of doctors and politicians held their self-congratulatory declarations and tossed blame around, we were outraged and dismayed that those who hold responsibility for this failure completely avoided accountability.

The current policymakers' Health Care Reform proposal in Utah is an oxymoron and promises to widen the gap between middle- and higher-income brackets and force more and more people into situations of poverty.

The obvious dilemma facing our state is a question of credibility. While we all may hope that our leaders are working to consider the challenges faced by those they serve, they simply cannot or will not relate to the common man and therefore have no frame of reference for making policies to address the needs of that group.

While spouting off that poverty is often simply caused by rotten luck and teenage pregnancies are a growing problem that should NOT be addressed by adequate sex education, our medical and political leaders completely failed to address the real elements of poverty in our state.

Wake up and take a stroll outside of your wealthy neighborhoods, your country club churches and your extravagant medical practices. Poverty will not be solved by punishing the poor.

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Amy Firth, Xander Gordon and Kim Shaw are graduate students at the University of Utah.