Health insurance costs sting farmers and ranchers
14 01 08 - 11:24
WASHINGTON - When the presidential candidates pitch their plans for overhauling the nation's health care system this year, the nation's farmers and ranchers likely will be paying close attention.
Like many ranchers and farmers in the Great Plains, Rapid City rancher Peter Boydston and his wife, Erma, have to buy health insurance on the open market – the most expensive way to get health insurance.
The couple pays $1,447 a month for an insurance policy for Erma, 64, that comes with a $2,500 deductible. Peter Boydston, 65, uses the Department of Veterans Affairs for his health care needs.
“I want to hear (the candidates) come out with a health care plan that will help us people in the middle-income bracket,” said Boydston, who’s counting down the days until his wife qualifies for Medicare. “People who are rich don’t have a problem with health care and the poor don’t either. There are lots of programs they can go to and get help, and I’m all for that.
“Us people who are working and paying for everything, we need some help.“
A recent survey of 2,000 farm and ranch families in Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Missouri, Nebraska, and North and South Dakota found that 90 percent had health insurance. However, the survey found that 36 percent of farm families purchased their insurance on the open market. The survey was conducted by Brandeis University for The Access Project, a health care research and advocacy group based in Boston.
Twenty-five percent of farm families reported that healthcare expenses contributed to their financial problems, and 20 percent had unpaid debts that were the result of medical bills. Thirty-seven percent of survey participants reported that their annual household income was less than $40,000 while 49 percent said their household income was between $40,000 and $99,999.
“It’s fairly common for farm and ranch families to have somebody who is working off the farm and the primary motivation is family health insurance coverage,” said Kristin Juliar, director of the Montana Office of Rural Health.
Farmers and ranchers would seem an unlikely group of people to be struggling to find affordable health insurance. In the past, when agriculture producers needed electricity, telephone service and banks that would lend to them, they formed cooperatives to provide these services. Neither the National Farmers Union nor the American Farm Bureau offer health insurance plans for their members, but a few of their state affiliates do.
“There hasn’t been enough organizing done around this,” said Niel Ritchie, executive director of the League of Rural Voters. “It’s like sticking a frog in a pan of cold water and turning on the heat. People have been gradually pushed further and further out as the health care industry has changed itself over our lifetimes.”
The Wisconsin Farmers’ Health Cooperative is believed to be the only health insurance cooperative in the nation that offers affordable health insurance to agriculture producers, said Bill Oemichen, president and CEO of the Wisconsin Federation of Cooperatives, which created the health cooperative. The health co-op has 2,000 members out of Wisconsin’s 14,000 dairy farm families, Oemichen said.
Congress gave the group $4.45 million to start up the program, which contracts with insurance giant Aetna. The co-op recently added the Mayo Clinic to its list of health care providers.