The Salt Lake City woman picked up bare-bones health coverage under an experimental state program called the Primary Care Network, pitched by former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, a past insurance executive, to help the growing numbers of uninsured.

But Pemberton calls the program "a Band-Aid" that covers only $400 of the $1,000 she doles out monthly for medications to treat pain, an auto-immune disease and chronic bursitis. She was one of several Utahns who gathered with low-income advocates Monday to critique a health summit being convened today by Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.

Similar events are being staged nationwide as part of Covered the Uninsured Week, an invitation to get beyond partisan rhetoric and, according to its promoters, discuss the epidemic of unaffordable health care "in America's neighborhoods."

But participation in Huntsman's summit is limited to insurance executives, bureaucrats and other health care policy experts. Uninsured Utahns weren't invited. And the only elected Democrat involved, Salt Lake City Rep. David Litvack, was added to the agenda late last week.

Also, to the dismay of low-income advocate Judi Hilman, the agenda includes no mention of the Medicaid funding crisis or Utah's Primary Care Network.

The program was intended to save money by helping recipients stay healthy and avoid expensive emergency-room visits, but was financed by raising co-payments and slashing benefits from some Medicaid recipients - hurting the poorest of the poor, says Hilman, health policy analyst for Utah Issues.

Hilman hopes PCN was overlooked because Utah leaders are moving toward more innovative ideas, even as the rest of the country is looking at adopting it, or something like it, under Leavitt's leadership as federal Health and Human Services secretary.

One approach to be aired at the summit by Joseph Jarvis, a physician and president of the Utah Health Alliance, rates as innovative in Hilman's eyes: universal health care.

Jarvis recommends taking all the money that taxpayers spend on insurance premiums, Medicare, Medicaid and myriad other government programs - an estimated $2 trillion each year nationally - and pooling it in a single fund to cover everyone's health care needs. Providing a one-stop shop for doctors and policyholders would cut administrative costs and improve care by fostering lasting doctor-patient relationships, Jarvis argues. His plan has a powerful and well-funded foe: the private insurance industry, which would be sacrificed to a cooperative.

kstewart@sltrib.com