Utah clinicians say it's now or never for health care reform

SALT LAKE CITY — No matter how Dr. Kyle Jones put it to his 50-year-old patient, the results of the physical were not adding up to a clean bill of health.

They were shaping into a profile of a man heading toward a sudden serious heart attack or disabling stroke sometime in the next 10 years.

Put him and three other men the same age with the same health history and habits in same room, and he's the one most likely to be taken out by one or the other catastrophic event. The standard prescribed lifestyle changes — more exercise, less fat — will help but won't counter what's really wrong with him: no insurance.

When you're one of the 360,000 working Utahns whose only health plan is to ignore a problem until you can't, risk factors are compounded and illnesses turn serious and more expensive to treat, Jones said Wednesday in explaining why he has joined the White Coats.

The new front-line coalition of more than 900 Utah physicians, nurses, clinicians and academics — including Nobel Prize winner Dr. Mario Capecchi — have signed a letter urging members of Congress to give final approval to federal health care reform legislation.

"He only came in to see me because his employer required a physical to keep his job," Jones said, noting that the employer who mandated the check-up didn't offer health insurance to help play for it. If his employer had offered health insurance, "his risk factor goes to 4 percent. His life is now in jeopardy because he doesn't have insurance and he has pre-existing conditions that make him uninsurable. He is stuck in a rut, unable to get out."

Different versions of the same story — patients treated for conditions that would have been caught much earlier if they had been insured — happen every day around the state and across the country. It's not because medical treatment is poor, but because the system of health care is broken, said White Coats member Dr. Kim Bateman, a physician in Ephraim. He said lack of insurance doesn't prevent someone from being sick, but lack of it is certainly making people sicker, sometimes fatally. Bateman added that a noticeable and increasing number of patients are coming in with untreated infections, complications from diabetes and asthma that are the direct result of not getting basic medical care because they don't have insurance.

Health care in the U.S. doesn't fail in a clinical way, Bateman said, but it fails by making care less and less affordable or completely inaccessible through insurance loopholes like pre-existing conditions, ever-higher deductibles, and co-pays and ever shorter lists of benefits.