Instead, the West Jordan lawmaker will try to vault his Senate Bill 34 directly to the House floor in the final days of the session.

To succeed, he will need more than votes; he will need to outmaneuver his House colleagues.

Buttars' bill would allow customers of any health plan to seek care from any willing provider as long as the doctor or hospital was willing to accept 95 percent of the insurance company's standard rate.

It passed the Senate easily but ran into resistance on the other side of the Legislature, where it was assigned to a hostile Business and Labor Committee.

Rather than let the panel kill the bill, Buttars and his Senate colleagues voted Friday to recall the proposal and merge it with Senate Bill 61, which establishes a task force to look at whether the Legislature should force IHC to sell off its health plans.

House Speaker Greg Curtis, however, was reluctant to send the bill back to the Senate, saying it makes no sense to confuse the two topics.

Buttars came to the same conclusion, but not before he accused Curtis of "playing games" with the bill and insisted he would not appear before a kangaroo committee.

That puts the committee in a tough spot: It would violate legislative protocol to debate the bill without the sponsor present, and to do so could lead to repercussions in the Senate.

If the committee does nothing, supporters of the bill could catapult it straight to the House floor. Even then, it would be a close vote.

Buttars is not worried: "No one thought I could get this through the Senate either," he said.