Health care for farmers

This story, from Laladey Tadesse and Jennifer Goldblatt of The (Del.) News Journal, touches on a situation I simply hadn't considered before: the problem of health insurance for American farmers.

The report introduces us to John and Cindi Filasky, who have been living for the past decade without health insurance:

The Filaskys are among the 21 percent of the roughly 1,600 full-time farm operators in Delaware who don't have health insurance … Nationally, 32 percent of farmers don't have health insurance.

"They just can't afford the premiums anymore," said Robert Baker, president of Delaware Farm Bureau. In the past four years, nearly half of the members covered by the bureau's health plan have dropped coverage, leaving about 650 farmers in the plan. "It's a very big concern. I don't know if you can classify it as a crisis, but it's close to it," he said.

Nearly a third of farmers nationwide have no health insurance.

I am not a farmer, but I do feel a connection to their situation because: 1) I eat the food farmers grow — nearly every day; 2) I've been "self-employed" without insurance and it's distressing and expensive; and 3) I'm one of those liberal types who thinks that everyone ought to have health insurance and that the government could do more to provide it.

Those three points correspond to why addressing this "very big concern": 1) should be a matter of concern for everybody, not just for those in rural areas; 2) is just plain the right thing to do; and 3) presents an opportunity for Kerry and the Democratic Party to make inroads in some red-state areas.

In a country in which some 40 million people lack access to health care, this should be a politically winning issue for Democrats. One reason it's not is that crippled-government Republicans have effectively framed this issue as a matter of "welfare," with all of the immorally moralistic and racial mythology that accompanies their usual attacks on "welfare handouts for the undeserving and lazy poor." Talking about access to health care for farmers, it seems to me, would help to combat these false and evil myths.

"Undeserving and lazy" is an unfair and inaccurate description of most of the struggling people who get some help from government programs, but just because this attack is unfair and untrue doesn't mean it's ineffective. It remains a powerful weapon for right-wing demagogues. But it seems to me this attack won't work if the subject is health care for farmers — a category of people who carry their own evocative mythology.

As far as this issue being a political winner for Democrats, I'm just guessing here. Electioneering isn't my area of expertise, and I'm not 100 percent sure that No. 3 above is accurate.

I am sure about No. 2 though. It's just plain wrong that a third of America's farmers are going without real access to health care. I'll leave it to the Carville's and the Brazile's figure out whether, in this case, doing the right thing is also the politically smart thing.