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

Those closest to where health-careservices and access to them intersect — employers — want consumers to have more rights and a lot more responsibility in the coming era of reformed health care.

Invoking in tone and title a previous set of precedent-setting documents, the Salt Lake Chamber unveiled its "Business Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" on Tuesday. The three-page list outlines four key ways the health-care system can be purged of waste, reduced in price and made a lot more accessible to the 300,000 or so uninsured Utahns.

Most of the 1.5 million Utahns who have health coverage obtain it through the workplace. Executives from companies representing 400,000 employees had signed on to the proposal by Tuesday evening.

"Consumers have limited choice and control under the current system," said Scott Hymas, chairman of the chamber's health-system reform committee and chief executive officer 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 No. 1 priority."

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

Businesses shoulder 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.

That has added to the growing number of residents who don't have insurance, which in turn increases health-care costs, Hymas said. 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.

Among the businesses that don't drop benefits plans, many employees are electing not to enroll in a health-insurance plan, which saves them money but adds weight and cost to the system when they obtain services that aren't covered and they can't pay for, he said.

The chamber's bill of rights addresses four key areas of reform: accountability of providers, waste, incentives and compassion.