By Andy Ostmeyer
aostmeyer@joplinglobe.com
SENECA, Mo. — The devil you know versus the devil you don’t.
That’s the choice facing Gary and Linda Emmert, who raise cattle near Seneca.
“I’m like everybody else,” said Gary Emmert. “I get aggravated with the danged-old insurance companies.”
Yet, he fears a government-run health-care option won’t be an answer, either.
“I’m a dyed-in-the-wool free-enterprise system (guy),” he said. “You get on a slippery slope when the government starts taking over.”
He compares the money he has invested himself and the return he’ll get on that to the return he’ll get on the thousands he has paid into Social Security over the years. For him, the advantages of the private sector make the choice a no-brainer.
“Just look at everything the government runs. It’s inefficient,” he said.
He also worries that a government-run system will remove incentives that pharmaceutical companies, for example, now have to develop new medicines and new therapies.
Yet, the couple also understand the drawbacks to the private system. The Emmerts are both in their early 60s and pay for their own insurance.
“Our insurance bill is nearly $700 per month,” said Linda Emmert. “We have a $5,000 deductible — that is the only way we can afford it,” said Linda Emmert.
“It’s not a maintenance policy — it’s a disaster policy,” Gary Emmert said.
“It’s cheaper for me just to tell the doctor I don’t have insurance,” she said. “For self-pay people, they do give a considerable discount. One doctor gave me a 20 percent discount.”
Gary Emmert said their rates have been rising about $100 per month each year, even though they’ve gone nearly two decades without topping that $5,000 threshold.
That is until this year.
His wife six weeks ago had an operation for early-stage uterine cancer. It was caught quickly, and chemotherapy and radiation therapy were not prescribed. From the earliest sign of a problem to the surgery, it was 30 days. Gary Emmert fears it would have been months or even longer if they were in a government-run alternative. Who knows how the cancer might have spread by then, he said.
“Speed is the essence,” he said.
But since the diagnosis, he worries that they won’t be able to switch policies or carriers and that no other private company will take them. So they’re stuck with a company that could continue to raise rates even more aggressively now.
“What I am afraid of with this insurance is we’ll have to pay thousands,” he said.
The couple have paid off their farm, but worry that they could lose it to pay for health insurance or health-care coverage.
“I am afraid it is all going to have to go to pay for insurance premiums,” he said.
“I think private insurance is the only way to go, but those fools, they jerk people around, they jerk hospitals around,” he said. “I hate the danged insurance company. They make me so mad I could spit fire ... but then I look at the alternative.
“I am just frustrated to death.”
Small business
“When you get into farming, it’s just a small business. I’m in no different shape than anybody in Joplin who has a small business.”
— Gary Emmert,
Seneca-area cattleman
