For-profit, for every body: South Metro group believes its three-tiered health plan would avert a national crisis.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: Q3 Industry Report: Health Care

Penny Baldwin is a cancer-survivor and a Greenwood Village health-insurance agent who appeared in part of the late Peter Jennings' last ABC News documentary, "Breakdown: America's Health Insurance Crisis." The show was broadcast Dec. 15, several months after Jennings' death Aug. 7 last year.

* David Laverty is a businessman who came to Colorado from California with a van, an MBA and a writer's conviction that consumers ought to be able to understand the contracts they sign: for health insurance, for home mortgages, for just about any major business transaction one might conduct as a private individual.

* Brian Vogt is a state official, director of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, and a former long-time president of the South Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce. On health-care reform, Vogt says, "This is going to be a passion of mine my entire life."

* David Crane is CEO of Littleton Adventist Hospital. He says he is personally determined not to retire from his industry without contributing significantly to a fix of the nation's health-care crisis.

* John Brackney is current president of the South Metro Denver chamber. He's also a lawyer and a former elected Arapahoe County commissioner. His ambitions lie far beyond his county's boundaries, however. "I'm trying to reform health care in America," he says.

Together, these five and other members of a health-care task force of the South Metro Denver chamber, known both for its quirkiness and a "no-fear" attitude toward change and innovation, have worked for two years on a plan to solve the nation's health-care cost crisis.

That's the same crisis that crushed Hillary Clinton politically when she was First Lady; the same crisis that Newt Gingrich, former Georgia Republican congressman and Speaker of the House, has formed a national organization to address; and the same crisis that Brackney calls "the single biggest issue in the American business community today."

In this report, Brackney's South Metro chamber is announcing the initial results of those two years of work: a plan to provide health care from cradle to grave for every American, but one that preserves the for-profit, business-based, health-care delivery system currently in existence by shifting costs of care to the individual consumer and taxpayer and away from insurance that is paid for by employers.

For the first time in the discussion of health-care reform in Colorado, however, the South Metro plan, a...