It is the age-old tendency of humans seeking to ease the pain of a sore back or a broken heart, lethargy or loneliness, to indulge in everything from heroin to horse liniment, from speed to speed dating.

Such self-medicating, of course, does not address the underlying problem. It only serves to mask it for awhile, perhaps allowing it to get worse, while you reach an even deeper state of blissful denial.

In the Utah Senate, the self-medicating drug of choice is speed legislating. Two bills in particular are being rushed through the process to address the real and imagined maladies of Intermountain Health Care's significant and, because it is the state's primary example of managed care, unique role in the market.

Except the bills don't address the maladies at all. They just provide lawmakers the short-term soothing balm of having done something.

Senate Bill 34, passed by the Senate last week, would allow customers of any health plan, including IHC's, to seek care from any willing provider, if the provider was willing to accept 95 percent of the insurance company's standard rate. Senate Bill 61, endorsed in committee and on its way to the floor, would outright ban IHC's integrated system of providing both health insurance and health care.

Both are designed to break IHC's widely disparaged, though overstated, stranglehold on health care in the state. Neither bill has been shown to be a net benefit for the health care of any person, in or out of IHC's networks. They won't help the uninsured or those covered by self-insurance plans that are exempt from all regulation.

The power of IHC in particular, and health insurers in general, is worthy of the state's attention. Cost-cutting measures never seem to cut the cost of anything, though they do lead to concerns about denial of, or undue delay in, necessary care.

It is too often forgotten, though, that insurance companies in general, and IHC in particular, are praised in other circles for overseeing care so that doctors and patients are not encouraged to repeatedly indulge in every one of modern medicine's expensive bells and whistles, just because they can.

But the Legislature so far has expressed no willingness to engage in, or hire out, the real work of seriously reviewing the state's health-care culture. A genuine oversight agency could provide an unbiased but intelligent review of what health plans should and shouldn't pay for. A law could limit offensive bill-collection tactics. Neither has been seriously proposed.

Such moves could be the real cure for what ails us. Quackery is not.