The plan offers medical, dental, drug, vision and other benefits through health insurer Humana to employers with two to 99 employees. Members will have several options including high-deductible plans with health savings accounts, preferred-provider organization plans and point-of-service plans, Natalie Gochnour, the chamber's chief operating officer, said Tuesday.

As many as 3,150 Utah businesses may be qualified to take part in the plan announced to members this week. That number may grow. Gochnour hopes the program will inspire more small businesses to join the chamber.

"Increasingly, employers are unable to provide health insurance to their employees, even though they want to. They face a choice of either going out of business or not providing health insurance," she said.

"This program we hope will attract many small businesses into a health-benefit program that is discounted but consumer-friendly," Gochnour said.

The chamber believes the U.S. health care delivery system is broken. In Utah, more than 300,000 people go without health insurance, in part because the number of private employers who provide benefits has declined from 57 percent in 1998 to 44 percent in 2005, Gochnour said, citing U.S. Department of Health and Human Services figures.

"We are just trying to do what we can privately to fix the system," she said.

Recent figures suggest the trend is continuing. Employer costs for health coverage are rising twice as fast as inflation, leading more employers to drop health coverage for workers, according to a 2008 study by Mercer, a subsidiary of financial services company Marsh & McLennan Cos.

The program should shave an average of about 2 percent from the usual cost of health insurance available from Humana, or about $1,000 a year for a company with 10 employees, said Earl Hurst, president of Humana of Utah.

"For a small-business owner, any way of saving money is a way for them to improve the positioning of their business. One of their top costs is the cost of health insurance," Hurst said.

He said Humana might expand the chamber program to businesses with more than 99 employees. Companies with just one employee appear to fall outside Utah laws governing group insurance, he said.

Hurst said it should be less expensive for Humana to write policies that are marketed to a pool of thousands of chamber members instead of to individual firms. As policies are renewed, employers who are chamber members will continue to get a discount, he said.

Humana has not written any policies yet. Executives of the company will meet with Utah insurance brokers today in Salt Lake to outline the chamber program to them.

Businesses that are members of the chamber and want more information should contact their insurance agents, Hurst said.

pbeebe@sltrib.com