In the last few years, Vermont farmers have contended with a series of disasters — back-to-back floods followed by a drought that stretched throughout much of this year’s growing season.
Now, many are quietly grappling with a different kind of emergency: soaring health insurance costs.
At a legislative meeting last month, Maddie Kempner, of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, said that farmers, many of whom are self-employed, stand to be disproportionately impacted by the loss of federal COVID-era health care subsidies set to expire at the end of the year.
“We’ve heard from farmers recently who are considering leaving the state or the country in order to access affordable care,” Kempner told state lawmakers.
Others are trying to figure out how they’ll afford skyrocketing premiums, or whether they should take the risk and go without.
During the week of Thanksgiving, Margaret Loftus and her small crew at Crossmolina Farm were busy getting their turkeys ready for their customers. On top of fulfilling her poultry orders, the West Corinth farmer was also crunching numbers.
She’s looking at her family’s nearly $300-per-month insurance premium almost quadrupling.
“We haven’t decided what to do,” she said. “We’re over 50. If I was 30, I probably would take the risk. But we're older and taking that risk would probably be stupid.”
For farmers, the stakes can feel particularly high — the physical nature of their work puts them at risk for injury, making the possibility of going uninsured all the more daunting.
“We depend on having health insurance because we have very physical jobs,” Loftus said. “Even operating safely, there’s a wear and tear on your body.”
Misse Axelrod is a farmer at Drift Farmstead in Roxbury, where she grows veggies and animals for meat, and runs a farm and forest school. Bracing for her premium to nearly triple, she laid out her predicament for lawmakers at the Statehouse meeting in November.
“Do we pay for insurance that consumes a huge share of our income, or do we go without it and accept significant personal and financial risk?” she said. “A single medical emergency could threaten not only our health, but also our farm and our livelihood.”
The state’s commercial insurers, Blue Cross Blue Shield and MVP, estimate thousands of Vermonters will drop health insurance as a result of the subsidy changes.
More: ‘It makes me sick to think about’: Vermonters get sticker shock during ACA open enrollment
Vermont’s seasonal farmworkers are likely to be among that group, according to Naomi Wolcott-MacCausland with UVM’s Bridges to Health program.
The 600-or-so foreign farmworkers who are in Vermont on H-2A visas are eligible for health insurance through the marketplace. Wolcott-MacCausland said the increases in premium costs — plus other program changes — will reduce enrollment for a group that is already underinsured.
Kempner, with NOFA Vermont, said the difficulty of obtaining health insurance as a farmworker has already had a chilling effect on employee retention, as farmers leave to find jobs with stable health insurance.
“So these dynamics really have a significant negative impact currently on the state of our farm economy and the well-being of our farmers,” she said. “And that’s only about to get worse next year.”
Even though the door hasn’t completely closed on Congress extending health care subsidies, open enrollment is underway. And Loftus, of Crossmolina Farm, said she’ll likely end up paying for a plan — and find other ways to save money.
“We don’t go to the doctor very often, so it just seems crazy to pay that much money,” she said. “And yet, you have to have it.”
