Nationally, welfare reform is hot. Health-care reform is not.
Utah moves to a different drummer.Health-care reform now enters its second phase, expanding coverage to those who are elderly or disabled and low-income.
But despite tough talk about welfare reform prior to the session, no formal welfare-reform bill passed. Instead, lawmakers expanded the existing welfare-reform pilot project at half the level requested by the Department of Human Services.
And the Work Toward Employment program (better known as Emergency Work Program), threatened with extinction through most of the session, survived.
In it, very low-income people who don't qualify for regular welfare earn $65 a week for 32 hours of work and an eight-hour job search.
The Health System Improvement Act, Part 2 of Gov. Mike Leavitt's "HealthPrint," expands access and creates an open enrollment period when insurance carriers must offer policies to a limited number of small businesses and individuals who have been locked out. The bill includes an "escape clause" in case "things start going south," according to sponsor Rep. Byron Harward, R-Provo.
The bill allocates money for health-education centers to improve rural health care and establishes a pilot project to compare cost-effectiveness and gather data on treatment effectiveness.
Lawmakers didn't reform welfare, but they did approve "intent language" to force human services to take what Shirley Weathers of Utah Issues calls "dramatic welfare-reform actions" without public comment. "I believe it was important enough and dramatic enough it should have been legislation, with a fiscal note and public comment. That didn't happen."