You think your health insurance costs too much. Try being a farmer.

Crain's Chicago Business reports:

John Kiefner, who farms 500 acres of hay in exurban Will County, has had health insurance from five companies in the past four years. One of them wouldn't allow his wife and him to visit any of their own doctors. Another wouldn't cover visits to the nearest hospital because it was out of network. All of them kept raising his premiums by 20 percent and more annually.

Kiefner will be lucky to net $75,000 on his farm this year. His last policy with Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois was priced at $22,000 for annual premiums, plus a deductible of $5,000 apiece. That meant that he and his wife, Sherri, were investing $32,000, or 43 percent of their income, in health care before their insurer picked up any expenses.

Stretched too far, the Kiefners took out a deep-discount health policy earlier this year offered by Golden Rule ​ Insurance that doesn't cover pre-existing conditions and is not compliant with the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. But at $6,000 for both of them, it was affordable.

"If my wife has a heart attack tomorrow and the insurance company finds out she had high cholesterol two years ago, I suppose they'll argue that was a pre-existing condition and won't cover us," says Kiefner, 53, who lives in Manhattan, roughly 50 miles southwest of the Loop. "But we farmers need some kind of protection. For now, most farm families are holding their noses as they pay up."

Small businesses everywhere are scrambling to acquire affordable health insurance as Congress argues over the repeal of Obamacare, a repeal that isn't likely to reduce costs for anybody. But for many self-employed farmers, obtaining coverage is becoming nearly unbearable.​

Annual premiums for even high-deductible plans for farm families can top $40,000. Net farm income in Illinois, meantime, plunged to an average of $77,000 last year from over $105,000 in 2013, according to the Illinois Farm Business Farm Management Association and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The reason: Farm commodity prices have tumbled, with corn dropping from more than $7 a bushel three years ago to $3.25 and less. Average living expenses in 2016 came to $82,300, with health insurance costs representing a giant slice of that.

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