System check; Health care reform tops Agenda for Chamber, Legislature.

• Author: Mischel, Marie
• Position: Focus

Business owners know only too well the impact health care costs have on the bottom line. The statistics behind those cost increases are staggering: in Utah, almost 12 percent of the gross domestic product is spent on health care, according to the Utah Department of Health. Nationally, that figure is 16 percent of the GDP, while the federal government spends 19 percent of its budget on health care, and this amount is expected to increase by more than 70 percent by 2015.

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For business owners, this situation proves to be a dilemma with no satisfactory solution.

"You want to provide health insurance so you have a healthy and productive workforce, and it helps make you competitive as an employer, but at the same time the skyrocketing costs have become unsustainable," says Natalie Gochnour, chief operating officer for the Salt Lake Chamber. "We have businesses that provide health insurance to their employees, and they experience double-digit increases in the premiums each year. It's become a significant cost issue for businesses."

The rumblings of protest from the business community have led the Chamber's board of governors to declare health care reform its top public policy priority, Gochnour says. "It's all about costs, because it's unsustainable," she adds. "We're very involved with policy discussions at the state level on how we fix our system."

The Legislature, too, has focused its attention on health care, although state politicians have acknowledged that the situation will require more than one session to find a workable solution.

"We're not going to pretend that there's a quick and easy silver bullet," says Senate Majority Assistant Whip Sheldon Killpack (R-Syracuse). "It is going to take time to make sure that we lay the proper foundation so it happens correctly rather than just making a knee-jerk reaction."

No Surprises

As part of that "proper foundation," the Legislature last year approved $600,000 in ongoing funds to improve transparency in health care reporting, Killpack says. The program would allow consumers easy access to information about health care costs from each facility, such as what treatment outcomes were expected and how much time patients were required to stay in a facility. "We feel in order to do a market-driven approach, transparency has to be in place up front," he adds.

In addition to the work on transparency last year, the Legislature offered tax relief to those who purchased insurance and gave preference in the state procurement process to businesses...