In a recent national survey, farmers said the biggest threat to their livelihoods wasnt low commodity prices or global trade policies. It was the rising cost of health insurance.
Its one of the reasons why state farm bureaus have jumped into the insurance game in Iowa, Tennessee and Nebraska, and are trying to in Kansas.
Members of the Kansas Farm Bureau spend an average of 30 to 40 percent of their annual incomes on health coverage, according to KFB President and CEO Terry Holdren.
Those are significant costs and theyre larger for most folks than their average mortgage payment, Holdren told a Kansas legislative committee earlier this year.
Premiums for Tim Franklin, a farmer from Goodland in northwest Kansas, nearly doubled between 2015 and 2018 and theyre still going up.
In 2019, well be paying just under $24,000 just in premiums for our family of five, Franklin said at a hearing in Topeka for which he made the nearly five-hour drive. Please give us some options.
The Kansas Farm Bureau is behind a bill that would allow it to market non-insurance health benefit plans. According to Holdren, these would be up to 30 percent cheaper than whats available through the federal health insurance marketplace, mainly, he said, because they would be exempt from state and federal regulations.
This legislation would give us the ability to say no to folks if they dont meet our underwriting standards, Holdren told lawmakers.
In other words, KFB could screen applicants and reject those with expensive health care needs, such as pregnant women or people who need substance abuse treatment or prescription drugs things that regulated insurance companies can no longer do.
Its that lack of a pre-existing conditions guarantee that has critics of the KFB plans concerned.
Allowing the farm bureau to play by a different set of rules would result in siphoning healthy individuals from the insurance pool, leaving companies like BCBS of Kansas with people who are sicker and more expensive to cover.
Supporters of the Kansas Farm Bureau legislation acknowledge that the coverage it would authorize would be less comprehensive. But, they say, something is better than nothing.
(Farm families) are not asking us to pass this bill, theyre begging us, said Republican state Rep. Don Hineman.The bill made it through both chambers of the Kansas Legislature with the help of more than a dozen KFB lobbyists, and is now in the hands of new Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly, who must make a decision by April 26.
