Thinking big about health care.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: Rschwab@cobizmag.com

3. DAVID KIKUMoTo, FORMER CEO OF BLUE CROSS BLUE SHIELD OF Colorado, left the health insurer in April 2000. He took some time off, then briefly got involved in a health-care equipment distributor.

But within a year, he helped start Denver Management Advisors, a consultant to large and mid-size employers seeking advice on how to contain their health-care and health-insurance costs.

The firm, now seven consultants, three of them partners, operates out of offices in Greenwood Village. It offers weekly case monitoring of both the treatment of employees who are making claims on a company's health plan and the billings piled up by those employees. The goal is to spot duplicate charges, abnormal treatments and "aberrant practices," as Kikumoto calls them. "We see a lot of them," he says.

The firm has helped a large construction company keep this year's annual increase in health-insurance premium costs to a percentage Kikumoto said was in the low single digits, and it actually reduced the costs of a large retailer year over year in 2002.

You see where I'm going here.

Yes, I'm back to sniping about the state's health-insurance crisis.

Kikumoto says the current General Assembly could do something about the crisis if it passes legislation that eliminates state-mandated benefits from health insurance plans, and provides for basic catastrophic coverage at an affordable price. Lawmakers, lobbyists and the governor already are pursuing those solutions.

But Kikumoto goes one step further. He would make it mandatory for all employers to offer the insurance. "Everybody has to have workers' comp, everybody has to have auto (insurance), why take the health piece out of that?" he asked.

Mandatory, as in mandates, however, is the word the current Colorado legislature is trying to take out...