S.L. Chamber outlines health-care reform 'bill of rights'

Those closest to where health-care services and access to them intersect — employers — will offer their own road map to system reform Tuesday at a news conference at the Capitol.

Bearing the signatures of prominent members of the local business community, a "Business Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" drafted by the Salt Lake Chamber will outline how they plan to engage the health-care reformation under way in Utah. It represents the endorsement of businesses with a total of more than 400,000 employees.

"Consumers have limited choice and control under the current system," said Scott Hymas, chairman of the Chamber's health system reform committee and CEO of RC Willey.

"Basic cost and quality information is simply unavailable and this lack of information eliminates typical market incentives that naturally encourage healthy competition and control costs. Building a fair, competitive system is our number one priority."

A special legislative task force spent the past five months developing proposals that would fundamentally change how medical care in Utah is provided and accessed. It will make recommendations to the Legislature in January.

Businesses are the front line of coverage for about 1.5 million working Utahns who enroll in insurance plans through the workplace. As a result, they have shouldered the day-to-day responsibility of negotiating benefits packages with a health-care system that is widely regarded as wasteful, inefficient and financially unsustainable.

Utah led the nation in 2007 in the number of businesses that stopped offering medical plans because they could no longer afford them.

About 1.7 million Utahns still have insurance coverage through their work. If a plan is discontinued, it has a compounding effect on the system. It adds to the growing number of residents who don't have insurance, now estimated at just under 300,000. It adds to health-care costs because people without insurance don't receive preventive care such as risk screenings and tend not to seek services until they become sick enough they resort to obtaining services at the system's most expensive providers — emergency rooms. Those bills, more often than not, ultimately go unpaid. Simply put, the health-care mode now in place is no longer sustainable, Hymas said.