A new study finds that the Affordable Care Act helps agricultural workers get better medical care—and avoid the ER.

More than 2.5 million agricultural workers help maintain the United States’ abundant food supply. They play a vital role in the economy, but their job is hard and often dangerous.

“Everything from the heavy machinery they use to the pesticides and other chemicals that they’re exposed to make it easy to get hurt on the job,” says Kwabena B. Donkor, an assistant professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

This low-income, largely immigrant workforce has some of the worst health outcomes in the US. Traditionally, farm workers have had difficulty getting routine preventive care because they’re often itinerant, working for a succession of employers who don’t provide health benefits.

“By the time they get to a physician, whatever health problems they’re dealing with are often far along,” Donkor says.

Farm workers who don’t seek treatment until their symptoms are too severe to ignore often check into emergency rooms, which are required under federal law to treat anyone, even if they are uninsured.

FEWER WORKERS SKIP HEALTH CARE

The Affordable Care Act, (ACA) the sweeping package of health care reforms signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010, was designed to bring health insurance and medical care to millions of people who previously could not access them.

“If you want a poster child for the sort of person that the ACA is intended to help, that would be a seasonal farm worker,” Donkor says.

Donkor wanted to find out what effect the ACA has had on the health of this chronically underserved group. As he explains, one of the key unanswered empirical questions about the ACA was how its benefits would affect the behavior of previously uninsured people.

GOOD FOR FARM WORKERS, GOOD FOR ALL

Getting an accurate picture of the ACA’s effect on farm workers was a complex endeavor, which may be why relatively little research had been done on the subject.

“There are a lot of moving parts to the ACA,” Donkor says. “And depending upon which state you were in, the law might be applied differently.” The law required states to expand Medicaid coverage to low-income households, yet a 2012 Supreme Court decision allowed some states to opt out of this mandate.

Read the full article about Affordable Care Act and agricultural workers at Futurity.