BYU NewsNet - Professionals Predict National Health-Care Reform will be Slow

A group of Utah lawmakers and health care professionals speculated how a new political administration will impact health care reform in Utah during a conference call Friday afternoon.

"This may be an opportunity of a lifetime that hasn't existed for a long, long time to achieve meaningful healthcare reform," said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, the national organization for health care consumers.

Experts said vast attempts to renovate health care have failed in recent years.

With the exception of Medicare changes in 2003, the last major health initiatives were passed in 1994 under President Bill Clinton. Utah lawmakers said there has been more talk than action in health care reform and President-elect Barack Obama is under pressure to live up to promises of tackling health care issues.

"You've got a wide disparity of organizations that are meeting together who've been on opposite sides of every heath care debate trying to find common ground," Pollack said. "The only way we can achieve sustainable real reform is bipartisanship."

Experts agree there is no question America's healthcare system is in dire need of repair. Although Obama has made health care a top priority all along his campaign trail, some are questioning if his proposal is realistic enough to alleviate the problem in the near future, especially considering the state of the economy.

"I think Congress does two things really well: they overreact or do absolutely nothing," said Rep. David Clark, current majority leader in the Utah House of Representatives. "I don't think that it will move as quickly as they anticipate."

John T. Nielsen, healthcare adviser to Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., expressed similar feelings. "I think Obama has got his hands so full with the economy right now, health care, while still important, has got to, in some respects, take a back seat," Nielsen said.

Clark also said Utah shouldn't wait for a federal solution, but continue down the road to assemble its own. Utah health reformers attest they are doing such by encouraging Utah companies to offer insurance to their employees, refining malpractice laws, and planning to revise issues in the private insurance market.

"So much remains to be seen, it's hard to speculate. I don't think we'll see any really significant fundamental changes at the federal level for a while," Nielsen said.