Ten percent of the nation’s farmers and ranchers cannot afford health insurance, according to a report issued Wednesday.
But that doesn’t mean the remaining 90 percent have insurance that meets their health care needs.
“One of the things we found was that for farmers, health insurance is often really farm insurance,” said Carol Pryor, policy director at The Access Project, a Boston-based research organization.
“There is a tremendous fear that should something catastrophic happen, they would lose everything,” Pryor said. “So a lot of the insurance they have isn’t very good because, disproportionately, they buy it on the non-group market, it comes with high deductibles, and they end up with a lot of out-pocket-pocket health care costs.”
The report, “Who is Uninsured?” is based on data gathered through a 2007 survey of farm and ranch operators in seven Plains states: Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
“Kansas wasn’t one of the seven states surveyed,” Pryor said, “but there’s not much reason to think the results would be much different in Kansas.”
The survey found that more than one-third of the uninsured farmers and ranchers spent more than 10 percent of their incomes on health care. Also, the uninsured were four times more likely to have incomes under $20,000 than those with insurance.
Other findings:
• Uninsured farmers and ranchers face much greater barriers to getting care and suffer higher levels of financial hardship than those with insurance.
• Uninsured farmers and ranchers delayed seeking health care more than twice as frequently as those with insurance — more than one-third of the uninsured delayed care compared with 15 percent of those with insurance.
• Sixteen percent of the uninsured farmers and ranchers lived alone.
• Age and gender differences between the uninsured and insured were not significant.
• Sixty-five percent of the insured respondents and 54 percent of the uninsured respondents described themselves as being in excellent or very good health.
The report and a transcript of the press conference are available of The Access Project Web site.