"This is beyond a state or regional problem," Pollack said. Efforts to induce reforms by states and individual insurance companies and hospitals are all well and good, he added, "but the scope and complexity of the problem is so big it defies any one state's or any single medical care company's effort to solve it."

The report puts a sharp point on a fact that health policy analysts in Utah and members of the Legislature's special legislative task force keep repeating: No matter how you look at it, no matter how you add it up, no matter what, the status quo is literally unsustainable — at their current pace, medical-care expenses will equal the average Utah family's income in about nine years.

The new report comes as no surprise to Rep. David Clark, R-Santa Clara and co-chairman of the Utah task force.

"While it tends to re-emphasize what we already know, it shows that the problem rolling toward us is going even faster than we thought," Clark said. "One of the major inhibitors to working our way through this is cost, and the cost of insurance coverage is just one piece of that overall price of health care."

Clark said that Utah, compared to other states, has higher-quality care and lower costs. "We're positioned better, but that doesn't mean the hill we're trying to climb isn't steep."

Health care has been proven practically impervious to change, and some of the best and brightest in California, Massachusetts, Oregon and other states labeled health care a problem too big to fix.

"I decided that the week we started, and that was 18 months ago," Clark said. "The other side of that coin is health care is too important and is putting way too much at risk not to fix, or at least not to give our best effort trying to."

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E-mail: jthalman@desnews.com