The impending policies of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will affect individual farmers and their employees. There are an estimated 600,000 crop workers and roughly 20,000 livestock workers in California at a given time. For every job in farming, the industry creates two to three nonfarming jobs. It's an industry that should thrive in California, where the climate is kind.
Yet, Obamacare adds more burdens on farmers, who already contend with onerous state and federal requirements that hamper production and harvesting. Specifically, H-2A visa rules and E-Verify hiring requirements, coupled with a shortage of agricultural workers, makes farming in the United States a difficult endeavor for small operators.
MCT ILLUSTRATION
"There's nothing affordable about the Affordable Care Act," Tom Nassif said to us; he's president and CEO of Western Growers, an advocacy group representing area and regional family farmers in Arizona and California.
Despite union leaders' aggressive push for a federal takeover of health care, it turns out that the Affordable Care Act could harm the very people it supposedly aimed to help: workers. Major unions, including the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters, wanted to keep current health plans and receive government subsidies to cover costs imposed by the Affordable Care Act.
Some unions – along with Big Labor – were exempted from the law through temporary waivers from the Obama administration. But, for the most part, the farming community is not off the hook. "A lot of our members will opt out," Mr. Nassif predicted. "They will choose to pay the penalty [for not providing health insurance] because it's so much lower."
Obamacare requires businesses with 50 or more employees, averaging at least 30 hours per week, to provide health coverage. Well before Jan. 1, 2014, farmers will need to decide whether it makes sense to drop health coverage, pay the penalty and look at providing supplemental pay for workers to get their own insurance. Or, they could look at cutting employee hours to avoid the mandate but will need to attract employees without offering health insurance – in an environment when there already is a shortage of workers.
In the event farmers drop health insurance, workers who lack proper documents could elect to go to hospital emergency rooms and walk-in clinics. This predictably would create higher costs for taxpayers and poorer outcomes for ill or injured workers.
Western Growers, which has been advising its members on the expected impact of Obamacare, also worries about future regulations on top of the new health care legislation. "You don't add to it," Dave Puglia, senior vice president of Western Growers, recommended, noting current burdens on the farming community. "Sacramento needs to place a moratorium on bills."
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