As the Legislature's Health System Reform Task Force limps toward adjournment next month, the hope for bold action to cover the uninsured has evaporated. In its place, the task force will recommend a package of incremental changes. Sowing small seeds likely will reap small results.

This group remains wedded to the status quo of the private market, even when most experts, including business leaders, concede that the market is badly broken. So, there will be no proposals for community rating (where everyone pays the same premium) or individual mandates (which would require everyone to buy insurance). There will be no independent commission to define a basic health benefit package, align it with evidence-based medicine and police the system.

There will be no market facilitator to orchestrate portability and collect premiums from multiple sources, and there will be only limited product comparison and transparency.

Comprehensive reform was too much for this task force to swallow.

Instead, at the behest of the insurance industry, Utah will tinker with what we've got, "the best broken system in the nation," as one member put it.

The modest innovations will come mostly in the form of a voluntary pilot program that would use an Internet portal to test new insurance products such as policies free of state mandates. It also would expand access to the small-group market for individuals (under certain circumstances). In the name of transparency, brokers would be required to disclose compensation, and uniform standards to exchange health plan information electronically would be created.

But the biggest of the little changes may be an experiment with a defined-contribution plan that would allow an employee to pool contributions from multiple employers, family members and government assistance to pay pre-tax dollars into a single policy.

Defined-contribution plans are not exactly new, and they may make some sense in limited circumstances, but we worry that opening that door to companies that insure themselves could provide a perverse incentive for more firms to drop defined-benefit plans. Think of it as a choice between a 401(k) and a defined-benefit pension.

There also are proposals to reform billing and claims administration, payments and the standards of proof for plaintiffs in malpractice cases.

These may be fine as far as they go, but they fall far short of the comprehensive reforms that both businesses and workers are clamoring for.