Health bill covers almost all Utahns

Virtually all Utahns who don't have medical insurance today would be covered by either an employer, a private provider or expanded government plans come 2019 under a health system reform bill getting most of the attention on Capitol Hill, researchers with the national health policy research and advocacy group Families USA have concluded.

Should the America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 now in committee ultimately be approved by Congress, 195,000 Utahns without medical insurance would be on a plan by 2013, and 300,000 would be signed up by the end of the next decade, the group's state-be-state assessment released Tuesday shows. Nationwide, 37 million of the 47 million currently uninsured would have coverage in 10 years, according to the report Coverage for America: We All Stand to Gain.

The report is the second of three assessments of proposed health care reform legislation to be released this month as national lawmakers get serious about health care reform. President Barack Obama reminded representatives Tuesday that despite the inherent costs to ramping up coverage for virtually every American, he is adamant about having signature-ready legislation by fall.

Although some critics of the House bill have called it an economic disaster waiting to happen and are bothered by what they see is an arbitrary, rush-job approach to the next big economic sector — 17 percent of all goods and services in the country and bigger than banking — set to come apart.

To frame the reform effort as a sudden issue too complicated to move quickly is to deny the fact that reform has been tried and failed multiple times over the years.

"Those concerns are significant, but they don't bode another failure for health care reform," Families USA executive director Ron Pollack said in a telephone interview. "No one is saying they are absolutely against reform of any kind like they were in 1993."

The additional cost of adding millions of people to insurance plans will be in the billions, but the economic damage from leaving it alone would rack up some real money in damages to families struggling in a struggling economy, Obama said Tuesday in a news conference reminding lawmakers reform is his top domestic policy issue and will not be lost site of again.

Health care insurance premiums since 1993 have risen at three times the increases in personal income, according to Obama and the Office of Management and Budget. Spending on health care totals $2.4 trillion a year. Despite recent promises by hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and equipment manufacturers to trim about that much over the next decade, costs in general are only predicted to get higher, along with the number of people who have no medical insurance, if something isn't done.