As the Legislature goes into session this week, one of its top priorities will be to finally tackle the issue of health care reform. Like many states, Utah has grown weary of waiting for the president or Congress to take the lead on this issue. It's been 15 years since then First Lady Hillary Clinton promised to fix our broken-down health care system, and despite that failure we've continued to ride on a train that's clearly running off the rails.

Approximately 300,000 Utahns, roughly 16 percent of the state, are uninsured. Some of these people are poor or unemployed. Others are working people whose employers no longer offer health insurance or only offer it at a rate that is unaffordable -- trends that hold particularly true in our state's predominantly small-business economy. Some are the so-called "free riders" -- mainly young, single individuals who are betting they won't get sick, or if they do get sick that the cost of care will be nowhere near what they would spend in annual premiums. Together, the uninsured constitute an enormous bloc of citizens who, dangerously, have no access to care for themselves and raise health insurance costs for the rest of us.

One goal of Governor Huntsman's health care reform package is to make health insurance personal and mandatory. In other words, every individual would be required to pay for his own health insurance, much like everyone must pay for auto insurance. This system would spread the costs of insurance over a significantly wider base, thus lowering costs for all. It would also lift the burden of insurance off of small business owners who want to do right by their employees but find their knees buckling. Finally, it would remove the largest barrier to health care access, raising the overall quality of life for hundreds of thousands of Utahns.

Last week, the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce gave Huntsman's plan a thumbs up and so are we. Although opponents portray it as such, the goal of universal coverage is neither pie-in-the-sky nor anti-business. To the contrary, it is the only basis on which to move forward toward the thornier issues of cost and quality of care. Only when we're all on board the train can we truly get where we need to go.