By DOUG GRAVES
Ohio Correspondent

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A report from Kaiser Health News states that 15.6 percent of Ohioans remain uninsured. Things are worse in rural communities, where just one-third of farmers in this state carry no insurance at all and a smaller percentage carry only catastrophic insurance.

Ohio farmers aren’t alone. A 2009 study by the USDA found that farm operator households spend more on health care than other U.S. households, spending an average of $5,200-$10,000 a year for health insurance coverage.

“Health insurance came up several times in interviews with farmers before we conducted our survey in 2007, so we decided to include health insurance as an issue in the recent survey,” said Shoshanah Inwood, a Social Responsibility Initiative (SRI) research associate in The Ohio State University’s College of Food, Agriculture and Environmental Sciences.

“But we were not expecting it to come out as the top concern. We were really surprised.”

The findings came from a larger study led by researchers at OSU and Utah State University.

The goal of the ongoing national study is to identify the challenges and opportunities of farming in urbanizing areas.

In Inwood’s study, researchers analyzed surveys from 453 farmers from eight counties in six states.

All operate in areas known as the “Rural-Urban Interface,” or rural land situated near increasingly urbanized areas.

The key result from this study was finding out that health insurance is identified as a serious issue for the majority of farmers surveyed, including 65 percent of commercial farmers (those with commodity or specialty crops) and 40 percent of rural resident farmers (who don’t rely on farming as a primary source of income).

“The cost of health insurance not only is a concern for protecting the farm family, but like many small businesses, it limits the number of full-time employees a farm can employ,” Inwood said.
“This limits the ability of the farm enterprise to grow to its full potential.”

To access affordable family health care, a farm operator or spouse often seeks benefits through an off-farm job, thereby limiting the time these families can devote to the farm and grow their business.
“When policymakers at the local, state or national level design local land protection and agricultural economic development policies, they should account for the issue of health insurance and how it impacts farm persistence and adaptation,” Inwood said.

He added he is pleased that the findings of the study are available just as interest in national health care policies are at a peak.
“An affordable and accessible national health care program would free up time and resources for farmers at the rural-urban interface and elsewhere,” Inwood said. “It would allow them to more easily reinvest in their enterprises, households and local economies.”

And statistics for minorities are staggering. In a recent poll conducted by the National Black Farmers Assoc. (NBFA), 78 percent of African-American farmers were shown to have no health insurance coverage at all.

There is hope. The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a sweeping health care bill (H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act) by a vote of 220-215.

But turning the bill into law remains uncertain – if the Senate passes its bill, both bills would have to be reconciled into one document and voted on again.

National Farmers Union President Roger Johnson had urged members of the House to vote in support of health care legislation, saying “it includes provisions that would control health care costs for the self-employed farmers, ranchers and small businesses that dominate rural economies.

“The bill’s public health insurance option will provide competition in underpopulated areas that have been historically dominated by a very few number of private insurers.”

Johnson added that rural Americans face unique challenges in receiving health care, citing factors such as distance from medical facilities, lack of adequate medical workforce and access to generic drugs and an aging rural population. 

Debate on the groundwork for the Senate’s healthcare reform debate was slated for yesterday, after press time.