And there is some hope that our lawmakers may be on the verge of doing exactly that.

Much of the session that ended Wednesday was taken up with fighting over whether and how to regulate a kind of health insurance that many of our neighbors can only dream of buying.

The result was a task force of lawmakers, supported by some independent experts, to evaluate whether the managed health care system provided to many Utahns by Intermountain Health Care is, as critics claim, micromanaging medicine to a damaging degree.

Those already priced out of the health insurance market, meanwhile, have often been unable to get the kind of preventative or immediate care that would keep them from getting sick, or sicker, eventually burdening the entire health care system for more money than it would have cost to have kept them healthy in the first place.

The intelligent, if not wholly sufficient, legislative responses to that were the late-session decisions to shake loose nearly $5 million in state funds - leveraging another $12 million in federal money - to mostly restore the vision and dental services that Medicaid patients lost a couple of years ago during a painful round of recession budget cuts.

Lawmakers also found $2 million of the $3 million advocates wanted to replace a federal program providing crucial mental health services to folks too affluent for normal Medicaid.

As it probes the entrails of IHC, the task force may finally grasp a key concept of managed care: Keep overall costs down by providing more evaluation and care early, thus avoiding the need for more expensive, perhaps futile, care in the later stages of a malady.

The same theory would apply to a bill, which sadly died for lack of understanding, that would have provided $6.2 million for DORA, or the Drug Offender Reform Act. The idea is to actively treat, rather than primarily warehouse, the many criminals who wouldn't be criminals if it weren't for their substance abuse problems.

Treat the drug habit and you've done more to rehabilitate a criminal, keep him or her out of tax-supported prisons and on taxpaying jobs, than prison cells and barbed-wire fences costing many millions of dollars more.

Sen. Chris Buttars' DORA bill passed the Senate, but there wasn't enough time left in the session to explain the complex concept - save tons of money later by spending some money now - to the House.

There's always next year.