Renewable-Energy-and-Economic-Potential

This article is from the Center for Rural Affairs’ October 2009 monthly newsletter. The authors are John Crabtree and Kim Preston.

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Angel Romero-Keister opened Cravings Café in Lyons, Nebraska, last year. Her husband and their son have health insurance, Angel does not. They could not afford the additional premiums to include her. A so-called “pre-existing condition” made purchasing coverage for Angel on the individual market virtually impossible. She has become a vocal advocate for reform. She has helped organize local and statewide events in Nebraska and has traveled with other small business owners to Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress for strong health care reform legislation.

Likewise, Larry Harbour, an entrepreneur from Broken Bow, Nebraska, has spoken out for health care reform. Larry’s story was reported by National Public Radio’s Howard Berkes in June. Larry opened LB Custom Chrome and Detail to good success, but he knows the cost of individual health insurance for him and his wife – as much as $12,000 to $20,000 in annual premiums – is a serious economic threat to their business. But they also risk financial devastation if they remain uninsured. As Larry told Howard Berkes, “If anything were to happen to my wife and I, the business is sunk … . Every day, we wonder when it’s going to happen – if something’s going to happen, are we able to afford that?
Angel and Larry, like so many other self-employed rural Americans, have taken great financial risks to start their businesses in our rural communities. We hold them up as examples of rural America’s drive and entrepreneurial spirit, and rightly so. They have done what we asked of them. They’ve taken a leap of faith, staked a claim in their communities, and worked tirelessly to make good on that commitment.

If rural America mattered, we would not allow a dysfunctional health insurance system to kill off the entrepreneurial dreams of rural America’s family farmers, ranchers and Main Street business owners. And we would see broad agreement about what reform can and should do – starting with instilling competition in health insurance markets by creating a national health insurance exchange buttressed by a public health insurance plan.

That should be where our vision for health care reform begins, for Larry and Angel’s sake and for the future of rural America, which is so intertwined with their entrepreneurial dreams.

Contact: the article’s author, John Crabtree, Media Director at the Center for Rural Affairs, at johnc@cfra.org or 402.687.2103 x 1010. Find out more about the Center at their website, www.cfra.org.  This article is from the Center for Rural Affairs’ October 2009 monthly newsletter. You can sign up for the free newsletter at http://www.cfra.org.

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