That, somewhat cynically perhaps, is the crux of the issue that will now quite properly be placed before a two-year, $415,000 special committee of the Legislature.

Throughout the legislative session, IHC-bashing had been the order of the day for some lawmakers worried about the limited choices being presented to people who can afford their own health insurance and to doctors who would like to afford their own laboratories and Star Trek scanning machines.

But late in the week, attempts to strip Intermountain Health Care of its tax-exempt status and/or force the amputation of its insurance arm were set aside. In their place is the fifth version of Sen. Michael Waddoups' Senate Bill 61, the creation of what has the potential to be a genuine study of health care choice, health care cost and how one affects the other.

It was a hopeful sign of cooperation between IHC, which will volunteer its own extensive and private data pool, and its most vocal critics. Both sides deserve some praise.

The first chapter in the committee's briefing book should be a new study from the Federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, which projects the cost of health care continuing to outpace inflation - climbing from 15 percent of the gross domestic product last year to nearly 19 percent in 2014. The same study predicts that, by 2014, federal and state government will shoulder nearly 50 percent of all health care costs.

If the Utah study is honest, it will see that health care is different from other segments of the marketplace. For most products - toothbrushes, computers, cars - competition holds costs down. In health care - lab tests, MRI scans, second opinions - competition pushes costs up.

While that is a dilemma for those who can afford health insurance, it is devastating for those who cannot afford it, now or in the future. And it is crippling for taxpayers and their responsibility to those who cannot obtain insurance at any price.

If the task force is truly visionary, perhaps Utah could take a real step toward resolving the conundrum of medical costs: a single, all-inclusive state health plan, operated by a winning bidder from the private sector (probably IHC), regulated as public utilities should be regulated.

It would be a model for the nation, skewed toward success by Utah's healthy risk pool. It would be a much bigger draw for new businesses than the end of the state's puny corporate tax. And it would abandon once and for all the fiction that competition in health care keeps costs down.