Statechart528.jpg

UninsuredMap528Corrected.jpg

SAHIEonly_States_Chartx560.jpg

Daily Yonder/Census Bureau This map shows the percentage of people under 65 without health insurance in every rural and exurban county in the country. Green counties have uninsured rates below the national average. Brown and red counties have rates above the national average.

A slightly higher percentage of rural Americans has health insurance than do urbanites, according to a new study conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. But there are large disparities in health care coverage state-to-state.

In rural counties as of 2006, 82.6% of people under the age of 65 (when Medicare coverage begins) had some kind of health insurance coverage. In urban counties, 82% of those under 65 years of age had health care coverage.

Exurbia had the highest rate of insured residents. In exurban counties, 83.4% of those under 65 had health insurance, according to the Daily Yonder’s calculations. (A map of rural, urban and exurban counties can be found here.) 

The map above shows how all the nation’s rural and exurban counties compare to the national average. In the United States, 17.8 percent of those under 65 don’t have any health insurance. The green counties on the map are doing better than the national average. They have uninsured rates below 17.3 percent.

Homemade Lures For your Fly Fishing

CoOpsRock.jpg

"Congress' efforts to overhaul the nation's health care system are plagued by an age-old urban-rural, east and west coast vs. the heartland schism in the Democratic Party," write McClatchy Newspapers reporters David Lightman and William Douglas.

"Congress' efforts to overhaul the nation's health care system are plagued by an age-old urban-rural, east and west coast vs. the heartland schism in the Democratic Party," write McClatchy Newspapers reporters David Lightman and William Douglas. The reporters point to a remark from California Democrat Rep. Pete Stark, the urban chair of the House Ways and Means health Subcommittee as evidence of the "tension" between city and country. "Well, the only co-op I know about is when I used to milk cows and we sold the milk to Golden Guernsey. And I think there's only one co-op left," said Stark, who considers the co-op idea a non-starter. "There aren't many of you listening who remember the co-ops of the '30s, which was a — just kind of a Roosevelt outgrowth of rural electric co-ops, phone co-ops."

Meanwhile, Democrat Rep Charlie Melancon of Louisiana announced he would run for the U.S. Senate as a "pro-life, pro-gun Southern Democrat." "The two sides don't understand each other. They're reading from different scripts," said Steven Schier, professor of political science at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn.

The health care fight has centered on whether there should be a public option for health insurance, or whether co-ops should be created as a competitor to the for-profit health insurance industry. Republicans have not shown an inclination to endorse either model.

I saw the same man at the Iowa Farmers Union convention this weekend and boy, his tune sure had changed.  He gave me an atta-girl pat on the back, shook my hand, thanked me for the Center for Rural Affairs' work on health care and told me how important health care reform was to Iowa Farmers Union.

I was throughly shocked and wondered what had made him change his mind. 

I'll never know for sure what made him realize the importance of health care reform but I am willing to bet Iowa Farmers Union members influenced him a great deal. 

It's people like Chris Peterson, Iowa Farmers Union board president, and Iowa Farmers Union staff Amber Anderson-Mba who have the courage and fire to tell the truth about health care reform and change minds. 

As the health care debate continues, never doubt your ability to change someone's mind with the truth. 

Texasdrought.jpg

Keltonstudy.gif

rain.gif

Keltonsheep.gif

San Angelo Standard-Times Elmer Kelton worked four decades covering ranching and livestock in West Texas. Here he is (left) in 1959 with Al Sledge, executive editor of the Standard-Times.

Living in the East in no way prepared people to live in the West. Walter Prescott Webb, the historian, described “what happened in American civilization when in its westward progress it emerged from the woods and essayed life on the Plains....” The vegetation, the wildlife, the topography, the weather — everything changed. The difference threw the settlers’ “whole way of life out of gear.”

“The salient truth, the essential truth is that the West cannot be understood as a mere extension of things Eastern,” Webb wrote in The Great Plains.

Nobody understood this difference, and it effect on the people of the Western Plains, like the novelist Elmer Kelton of San Angelo, Texas.

Elmer Kelton died last week. He was 83 years old, and in his time he wrote the best books about the treeless land and the work that men and women faced when they moved beyond the 98th meridian.