Farm Bureau spreading manure past its prime

This week Michigan Farm Bureau sent messages out that served multinational corporate influenceres much more than Clinton County's farmers. They re-served the mega-rich's propaganda against the Health Care Reform Bill. They were misguided. Our rural communities, farmers, farmer-workers and their families need healthcare choices now and there a lot of benefits to them in this bill. Too bad the Bureaus couldn't have influenced their legislators earlier.

Rural Communities Needed Insurance NOW

Not much has changed since my husband and I grew up on farms in Clinton County. Like elsewhere, its rural residents are under-insurance compared to urban residents (USDA, 2007.pdf).  For years, farmers have taken second jobs to get insurance. Many of Clinton County's 1200+ farm operators (Census 2007.pdf) already rely on government-organized/funded insurance: a) through their spouses' job at Michigan State University, the State of Michigan, or a public school, b) Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, or c) Veterans Administration.

Most of the farmers' laborers use taxpayer-funded healthcare (though not efficiently) -- either through the systems listed above, or by default through expensive emergency room visits and preventable hospital admissions since the costs are passed on to the insured.

Farm Bureau author Findlay admitted that “Most farmers are self-employed and buy health insurance for themselves and their workers." However, his logic then took a sharp turn for the bizarre when he concluded, "So mandates requiring individuals to have health insurance and employers to provide health insurance for their workers is a huge burden.” What???

We lose farmers because of lack of health insurance, as well as other financial difficulties of farming. Too often, farm owners, hired help and their families must:

• delay care,
• do not get important care at all, creating more expensive problems and difficulty in daily life,
• are forced into the ranks of the disabled (no longer paying income taxes and living diminished lives), 
• take second jobs which put additional burden on their relationships and their health,
• go bankrupt with medical bills being a contributing factor.  

I read in the conservative blogs that the Health Care Bill is another entitlement program whereby the liberals are trying to give further subsidize the "lazy welfare" class. I couldn't disagree more. Farmers and other entrepreneurs and small-business owners are not lazy. By helping our fellow citizens, our nation is less vulnerable. It is more stable and able to compete with foreign companies, many of whom do not have to worry about paying for healthcare because it is already a government service.

Mandated Insurance Complaint has Merit -- but Uselessly Over-Ripe
Farmers and other citizens needed a way to get affordable health care. The rest of us needed a way to keep insurance premiums fair. How to do it in the U.S. has been debated for over 50 years. 

Why is the national (and thus state Farm Bureaus) complaining about mandated insurance now, when they had ample opportunity to sway their Republican representatives to write their own bill. There has even been an entire year to push for keeping the public option and to include a single-payer accounting system, within this bill -- sections that would have saved so much more tax dollars and avoided mandates?

The public option combined with the single-payer option would have given medical coverage to essentially every farmer, farm employee and family member in Clinton County. Republican's fought hard to remove free/low-priced public option from the health care bill. As a compromise with Republican legislators, these enormous cost-saving and cost-controlling measures were replaced by fully private market based insurance.

Unfortunately, since private insurance company executives prefer a higher profit margin than government, this meant the cost per person would be much higher. Both parties agreed the Health Care Reform Bill should not raise the deficit. Hence, the individual insurance mandate. Many in the middle (not poor enough or old enough or rich enough to already have Medicaid or Medicare) will need to sacrifice either in insurance payment, tax on their existing plan, or pay a fine in order to get national savings on medical costs.

The insurance purchasing mandate is the result of messy sausage-making expected from legislative compromising. What is unexpected and unfortunate is that given Michigan Farm Bureau's insights into family farmers and small farm operators, they still try to stir up antagonism towards this bill. “The threat of a penalty for noncompliance only worsens the situation for people unable to afford coverage.” It may indeed, but that penalty was being paid sadly through higher premiums and sicker people prior to this bill which could have been so much better with less partisanship.

So where was Farm Bureau
-- when our Republica-held White House and legislature were doing absolutely nothing for the past 10 years? 

Where was Farm Bureau
-- when Representatives like Clinton County's 8th District Mike Rogers and others stalled and fought healthcare reform simply because it was led primarily by Democrats (or because their main campaign contributors were insurance and pharmaceutical executives)?

Where were the Farm Bureaus
-- when special interest groups like the Insurance executives were fighting the public option and the single-payer administration?

It's unfortunate, because the bill could have been so much better for the American people and for Clinton County residents. The Farm Bureaus and other groups purporting to care about their rank-and-file had ample opportunity to push a health care reform agenda that would serve the vast majority of farmers. Instead, they kept silent or repeated misleading propaganda.

The Next 50 Years -- Less Monday-Morning Quarterback & More Action
In the future, I hope to see the Michigan Farm Bureau educating farmers about the benefits to them and their children, so they can take well-earned advantage of those benefits.  These include:

• children can stay on their parents' plan until age 26
• rebates and discounts on pharmaceuticals for Medicare Part D recipients
• ban on refusing insurance to people because of pre-existing conditions
• ability to form non-profit co-ops for reduced insurance rates in 2012 -- something more farmers and the Farm Bureau should look into
• small business tax credits for employer-based healthcare coverage
• free preventative care
• ban on insurance companies dropping people when they do get sick
• a bit more transparency on insurance company profits

Now is the time to get familiar with the benefits to the middle class, to start protecting those benefits, and to push Republican and Democratic legislators to cooperate in making the system work for even more people. This bill is far from perfect and small problems could loom large.  The average Joe needs to get educated, think about value to the nation, and then push legislators from both parties to make future amendments. Both parties must get monitoring in place to keep fraud and healthcare costs down -- regardless of future campaign contributions from big pharma, big insurance, and big for-profit hospital systems.

References:

2007 Census of Agriculture. Retrieved from http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2007/Online_Highlights/County_Profiles/Michigan/cp26037.pdf

Findley, R. (March 2010). MFB worried about ramifications of health care bill on farmers. Retrieved from http://www.michifb.com/mfb

Loving Couple Divorces to Stay Afloat Financially. (Nov 16, 2009). http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/16/loving-couple-divorces-to_n_287094.html

USDA (2007). Rural Health Care and Health Insurance: Farm Bill Forum & Comments Summary. Individuals living in rural areas are more likely to be uninsured than those in urban areas... although they are 50 percent more likely to have Medicaid coverage." Retrieved from http://www.usda.gov/documents/RURAL_HEALTH_CARE_AND_HEALTH_INSURANCE.pdf

Smith, S. (March 23, 2010) Healthcare Bill Summary and Timeline. Retrieved at http://www.huliq.com/8738/92142/health-care-bill-summary-and-timeline

http://twitter.com/michfarmbureau

U.S. Retrieved from http://www.rules.house.gov/111_hr4872_secbysec.html

Weiss, K. (2008). Farmers' Health Insurance: A Costly Row to Hoe. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97234334