Zaniya-Romney-ClintonCare No Help for Farmers

The Access Project produces more evidence that the private market fails to provide "affordable, comprehensive" health insurance coverage to our farmers and ranchers. Among the lowlights (as reported in a summary on Nebraska.TV): farm families buying their own insurance spend $4,359/yr more for their health insurance than those who can get insurance through off-farm employment. Neither option is good: either a farm family puts itself at a $4k+ competitive disadvantage by buying its own overpriced insurance, or they send someone to town to work just for insurance, thus depriving the farm of valuable labor. Either way, the family farm takes one more hit in its battle against the big corporate operations.

Mitt Romney says farmers and ranchers and their like aren't being responsible enough and ought to be forced to buy private insurance, like the plan he imposed in Massachusetts; Clinton's faux-universal care offers the same sop to the private insurers. The Zaniya Project considered it (see recommendation #14), then backed off (see recommendation #4, p. 8), but the idea is still going to be floating out there in our Capitol full of insurance agents.

"Solving" the lack of access to affordable health care by requiring people to buy insurance makes as much sense as solving hunger by requiring people to buy food. It's also an insulting dismissal of working people who find they can't afford anything but the stingiest, highest-deductible plans the private insurers will offer. Requiring people to buy health insurance is also a failure of political courage and imagination... although the rest of the industrialized world, as well as Dennis Kucinich, has already done the imagining for us.

I've said it before (when the first Access Project brief on this topic came out), and I'll say it again: our farmers and ranchers don't need to be told to be more responsible for their own health care. They're already doing everything they can. Our political leaders need to find the will to create a system that does what insurance was meant to do: guarantee access to health coverage while protecting the family farm's financial security. The status quo does neither. A single-payer, not-for-profit, genuine universal health care system isn't socialism; it's common sense, and a restoration of competitive advantage for our independent family farms and ranches.