Letter - Your voice is crucial for rural America

To the editor:

In rural America, where campaign events are often smaller and less formal, you have an excellent opportunity to talk to candidates about ensuring everyone has access to affordable, quality healthcare.

You could ask candidates for state office to support the new health insurance marketplaces that foster competition among insurance companies and help individuals and small businesses band together to negotiate better premiums and benefits.

You could ask state and federal candidates to support incentives that bring doctors, nurses and other providers to rural communities. You could ask federal candidates to support efforts to keep rural hospitals open, ensuring life-saving services close to home.

You could ask federal candidates to support the expansion of Medicaid in your state, covering adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. Because without the Medicaid expansion, more than 16 million uninsured adults nationally with incomes below the poverty level would be left without an affordable coverage option and will still face the stern economic and health challenges of being uninsured.

These provisions of the Affordable Care Act will help provide a better healthcare safety-net to those rural Americans most in need, and your voice is crucial to making sure that happens.

John Crabtree,

Center for Rural Affairs

Lyons, Nebraska

Tags: opinion, letters