The numbers are not encouraging to advocates for health-care reform and members of special joint private and public task forces reviewing the situation.

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. views the report as more evidence of just how deep — and necessary — changes in health care will have to be. Huntsman sees the report as highlighting the need for reforming the health-care system, not just the cost or delivery of health-care services, said Lisa Roskelley, speaking Wednesday for the governor, who is in India this week.

The source of decline in employer-provided coverage is what EPI economist Jacob Hacker calls a side-effect of runaway health-care costs generated by a $2.2-trillion-a-year medical industrial complex "that is enormously wasteful, ill-targeted, inefficient and unfair. The best medical care is extremely good, but the Rube Goldberg system through which that care is financed is extremely bad — and falling apart."

Judi Hilman, executive director of the Utah Health Policy Project, agrees. "There is no doubt the system is broken," she said. She told a conference of health-care providers, small business owners and government officials from across Utah last week that whatever reforms are undertaken, any substantial steps toward addressing cost and access of all Utahns is at least a three-year project.

A task force charged with studying Utah's privately owned health-care market concluded last fall without making any recommendations about how to better the system.

A local twist in a nationally complicated issue is the fact that Utahns who work for the 60 percent of businesses that still offer health-insurance coverage think the system is just fine, said Norm Thurston, health economist of the state Department of Health. For employees at the 40 percent of businesses that don't, "things are not so great."

According to the department's 2006 market report, comprehensive health-insurance premiums in Utah have risen nearly 70 percent since 1999, an increase of about 9 percent each year. In that same time, the number of Utah residents with comprehensive coverage has declined by 13 percent.

According to health-department figures, the state's current uninsured rate is 11.9 percent, or more than 300,000 residents.

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E-mail: jthalman@desnews.com