Shurtleff sounds alarm on reform

The federal government could well find itself in court if it follows through on imposing special fines and other sanctions against employers who don't offer health-care coverage under the current U.S. House reform proposal, Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said.

"We don't know exactly what reform will be yet," he told the Deseret News prior to speaking to a group of area physicians Tuesday evening, "but whether it's Pelosi-care, Baucus-care, Reid-care or Obama-care or any of the other reform proposals finally approved that rams reform down our throats, it will be seriously reviewed for possible state constitutional violations."

That's not to say that reform isn't needed or shouldn't be done, he added.

"The rule of thumb in this process must be that states, many of which like Utah are much further down the reform path than Washington is, can tailor their own solutions that must take precedence and have opt-out clauses to Washington directives that don't fit or run counter to what Utah decides works best for Utah," he said.

"We need to allow the free market to work openly as opposed to the way the current federal legislation seems to be headed," Shurtleff said.

His comments came the same day that the insurance industry, using the same argument and whose support of reform has markedly cooled in recent weeks, began ramping up full-scale opposition to the reform bill that passed the U.S. House this month.

The industry is calling for an independent economic impact study in light of its own assessment that the federal General Accounting Office is massively underestimating the cost, both in the price of the reform and the financial decimation of private insurance companies.

A spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans said the reform packages in Washington aren't addressing the five big factors driving up health-care costs:

Overuse, underuse, and misuse; explosion of new technologies without comparing them to existing procedures; defensive medicine; personal health habits that cause chronic diseases such as heart disease and diabetes; and cost-shifting to private payers to make up for government insurance plans that underpay and the uninsured who don't pay at all.

e-mail: jthalman@desnews.com