Well it was bound to happen, I have to discuss a bill proposed by Chris Buttars (R – West Jordan, District 10). Surprisingly, this bill isn’t, in and of itself, too bad.

S.B. 119 is a bill would create a task force to evaluate the patients that come into the emergency room of a hospital. The idea behind this is to see how many of these visitors are legitimate and how many are doing it to get their jollies up.

The bill goes into detail about who will sit on the committee, but really it is more of the same: seven from the House and five from the Senate – and to be fair, there is nothing very interesting about how they are picked either.

No, I am posting this for an utterly different reason all together. I am curious as to what the task force will find and what Senator Buttars thinks it will find.

I suspect that Buttars thinks that people are going to emergency rooms because they don’t know of any particular alternatives – they are needlessly going to ER’s and raising the cost of health care for the state to cover those who can’t pay the bill themselves. After all the bill specifically states that the task force should “find ways to create incentives to decrease inappropriate use of hospital emergency rooms.” What I also suspect will happen is that all of our fears will come to light – that people are using emergency rooms because people can’t afford the preventative care Democrats have been shouting about for years.

I hope this bill does pass; I also hope that the task force will actually listen to all sides of the argument, as opposed to task forces’ in the past (effect of illegal immigration task force *cough, cough*).

If they do their job, this bill could prove to be a watershed moment for legislators who fundamentally don’t understand the problems we face in regards to some of the high health care costs the state has to absorb.