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Hello and welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Lowe.
This week meet a Buffalo County family
that may have to sell its dairy farm to pay the medical bills
for their two special needs children.
It's hard to afford health insurance.
You just you just can't afford it.
Find out how this machine is making life sweeter
for cranberry farmers.
And spend a day with a Milwaukee woman who's made it her mission
to transform her neighborhood and the lives of the people
in it.
It's not just to help people for today,
but hopefully it is to change lives.
Besides taking you to that Milwaukee neighborhood
will bring you to another place where people once lived around
9,000 BC in Wisconsin.
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Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the people of
a lient energy who brings safe, reliable and environmentally
friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods,
and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
A lient energy offering energy saving ideas
on the web.
UW Health providing specialty and primary care
for all ages throughout Wisconsin.
Information on UW Health Physicians
and Clinics and on University of Wisconsin Hospital is available
on the web.
And Wisconsin's technical colleges providing
local education for the crucial occupations
essential to our communities.
Wisconsin's technical colleges communities
first. Additional support for coverage of the great
likes is provided by the Wisconsin Coastal
Management Program and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration.
The rising cost of health care, it's crushing
some Wisconsin families and they want the governor,
whoever it is, to make this issue priority one.
Frederica Freiberg visits with a Buffalo County
Farm family for our latest What's the Plan report?
Our series on issues in the race for governor.
Freiberg reports that medical costs are forcing
this family to make tough choices.
On a farm tucked among the hills and
valleys of Buffalo County, 36 year old Melanie
Princhinski says she no longer even notices the beauty
around her because she is so stressed out.
We're all getting very sick and
tired of this and it's going to get to a point
that you sell the farm.
Selling the farm is not a choice
this family wants to make.
Melanie's husband 42 year old Bill Prisinski represents
the third generation of his family to run
this dairy farm in the hills of Buffalo County.
But the costs keep climbing while the income is
unpredictable. What the way farming is your milk
prices are up and down, up and down.
It's not a it's not a steady thing.
They change weekly your milk prices do.
When milk prices went up last year, this family
actually suffered a big blow because the state health
insurance program for low income families with
children known as Badger Care dumped the Prisinski's
this past August after they made too much money
to qualify.
And it's time I think that people start
waking up and realizing that farming we bust our
butts here and we pay our own insurance and it's
it's awful.
It's awful what we have to pay and
then for our own state to kick us off because we had
one quote good year of farming.
This year milk prices are half what they were last year,
but the Prisinski's still had to find other health
coverage because Badger Care was based on the
prior years income and that's a big deal in this family.
Because their six year old daughter Michaela is
diabetic. Her doctors visits and supplies are
expensive and time consuming.
Neither parent can work full time off the farm
for health insurance because of Michaela's
needs. And the Prisinski's 14 year old son Jeremy
has his own special needs.
They include ADHD which requires a special team
of doctors and medicines.
Right now the family is in a high risk insurance plan
for Michaela, but because diabetes is considered
a pre-existing condition her mother says coverage
doesn't kick in for six months.
It makes me feel awful.
I words can't say the stress, the emotional
draining this insurance has has put us through.
I mean it's it's terrible.
I mean I have a son with a farm of a disability, my daughter's
diabetic and your own state doesn't care.
They basically don't care.
And I just think it's awful that
you know we can't help our own people out.
How to help our own people
out on health care?
We ask the candidates running
for governor.
What's the plan?
Republican candidate for governor Mark Green
favors health savings accounts.
I don't believe that big government is
the answer and I don't believe the big insurance
is the answer.
I think what we have to do is
provide more options for families.
Give them more healthcare choices.
One of the things I don't
understand that governor Doyle did, he's the only
governor in the nation, Republican or Democrat to
veto tax deductibility for health savings accounts.
Health savings accounts are not at silver bullet
but they are a great answer for lots of families.
Mark Green also promotes requiring healthcare
providers to publish their real prices and provide
cost estimates to help patients shop for care.
He would create a statewide
public private wellness initiative to lower
healthcare costs and he wants to lower the amount of
money patients or families can get in pain and suffering
damages in medical malpractice cases.
Green Party candidate for governor Nelson Isman backs
universal health care.
Universal health care pays for itself.
Right now two thirds of our spending on
health care in Wisconsin is publicly funded.
The overhead on the private
insurance, um, transacting all this health care back
and forth amongst each other, the 100 private
insurers that are involved, that's more than a 30%
overhead. Isman wants to expand the Badger Care
program to include everyone.
He would have the University of
Wisconsin design what he calls a public health utility.
He also would like to see
more use of walking clinics instead of emergency
rooms. Democratic incumbent candidate Jim
Doyle proposes something called Badger Care Plus,
which includes a provision that would help
farmers by not counting equipment as part of their
income. We're working to expand Badger Care to
cover more families, to go from 175, 185% of the
poverty limit to 200% to take in more families.
I've also proposed and we're working hard to get
this done approval from the federal governments
required to allow Badger Care to be opened up so
that families can buy into it from whatever
income for their children because my goal is to get
every child in this state insured.
Doyle says his number one priority is
creating buying pools for catastrophic care, which
he says would lower health care costs for businesses
and protect citizens against losing everything.
He wants to make health insurance premiums tax
deductible and continue moving seniors out of
nursing homes and into the community to save money.
Health care policy expert Linda Rivets, listen to the
candidates' ideas and wait in, beginning with Mark Green's plan
touting health savings accounts.
Congressman Green has chosen what people
refer to as the market based approach.
The idea behind health savings accounts is that
people have skin in the game.
We're going to allow, we're going to encourage you with a
tax deductible savings account to do something and in
exchange you're going to do something you're going
to get a health insurance policy which doesn't pay first
dollar coverage or anywhere near first dollar coverage.
But there are a lot of people for whom they probably won't
work. If you have a chronic condition take a lot of
medications they may not work.
If you're over 50 years old I've read
things in the Wall Street Journal saying probably
not a good idea for you.
Transacting. Next, Rivets considers Nelson
Eisman's ideas.
What I was struck by in his proposal
was he said universal health care universal
health insurance pays for itself.
If universal coverage paid for itself
I suspect we would have done it a long time ago.
So it would have been easy and it's not easy.
That we can help.
As for Governor Doyle's
multi-pronged plans that include expanding badger care,
making health insurance premiums tax deductible
and creating buying pools for catastrophic care.
He is really in the most traditional mode of I'm
going to do a little of this and a little of that
and see try to solve particular sets of problems
and hope that folks who have those particular problems
will be appreciative of the fact that I'm trying to make an
effort to solve their particular health care problem.
And many of them will work.
According to a recent state survey 14% of Wisconsin
farm families are uninsured.
Even more are underinsured.
One farm family in Buffalo County has
insurance of last resort.
But wants something better.
The Prunchinsky's say they're not looking for
a handout.
Just a little stronger.
Hand up.
And we really really could use
the help and it's time that our government stands
up and does something.
You can get more information
about the gubernatorial candidates by going to
Wisconsinvote.org. Once there you'll also find other
election-related news coverage, info on voter registration
and more about other state political races.
Our next report also touches on the issue of
health care.
Milwaukee resident Cordelia Taylor
looked around her neighborhood and saw a shortage of long-term
care options for low-income senior citizens.
Taylor was frustrated by the
lack of response to that need so she decided to do
something about it herself.
On Milwaukee's north side on a
quiet street across from this boarded-up home sits a row
of beautifully maintained houses.
Little on the outside would tell you
that this is a residential care facility for low-income seniors
or that it's the life work, the mission of Cordelia
Taylor. That's all right.
This is family house so named because it started
with the Taylor's original family house.
And the early 70s we moved to
the suburbs because our last child had gone off
to college and we didn't need a house of this size
so we rented it to another family and we moved to
the suburbs.
There Taylor worked as a nursing home
administrator but she became discouraged by
how the institutional needs of the facility
dictated how residents had to live their lives.
They were told what time to get
up and told what time to go to bed, told what time
to sit down to eat and how long and all of this.
And I'm a believer when people have worked very
hard all of their lives.
When they get to the end of their life they should
have freedom of choice.
But when she proposed changes her boss wouldn't
listen. And she said your job is not to write
policy, your job is to take care of people.
And I went home in tears and
told my husband and he said well why don't you open
your own and shut your mouth.
Taylor's husband also suggested turning their
old family house in Milwaukee into the care
facility. Then Taylor learned that to get a license
they would have to live within 15 minutes of the
home. So I went back home in tears and told my
husband again and he said well we came from down
there let's go back and we moved into a boarded
up house right down the block.
That was in 1987.
They quickly learned they were not coming back to
the same old neighborhood.
I had a room to wake me.
There was shooting at night.
There were our people gambling on the
sidewalk. There was a corner bar at the end of the street where
there were parties and drugs and it was just not
a very good situation.
I had gotten myself into it
and I couldn't back out and I didn't want to tell
my husband that I had made a mistake.
So the way I would deal with it is I
would tell him all day everything is just fine
just fine and when everybody goes bed at night I'd go in the
bathroom and cry and ask God to help us get out of this mess.
Well you see God didn't you can see God didn't
help me get out of this mess.
He just kind of fixed you so I could live in this
mess. Soon after the tailors fixed up their old home
to house eight residents they expanded and put
on an addition but that wasn't enough to fulfill
family houses mission.
So soon they bought the house next door and so
on down the block until almost every house on the
block was a family house.
Now 58 seniors call family house home like
96-year-old Jesse Coleman.
She appreciates the home's
flexible schedule particularly on days she comes back
from being on dialysis.
When I come in I won't eat my dinner and go to bed
56 o'clock on the above.
Nobody said you can't go or go away with these two
of you that nobody said I like that.
All right in that to get your strength back.
Sure we'll look at you.
So I will cook you some greens and cornbread
then if that'll get your strength back that's an easy
thing to do.
What's remarkable about family houses growth
is their policy to admit people regardless of ability to pay.
Be 14.
While most residents eventually receive funding
from Milwaukee County family house will admit them
even before they're enrolled in the government system.
Oh God what?
How many hands?
My mother was in her 80s and she had been
diagnosed with dementia.
Gloria Billings moved her mother into family house while on the
waiting list for county support.
The county told us it would be from two to three years before
Miss Taylor would get paid.
So Miss Taylor let me volunteer two days a week they have
paid for a living here.
And from the first day I came here as about a year
I wanted to stay here.
I was looking to see you over time you know
me. No no no over time.
And she has stayed now on staff as the family house scheduler
one of dozens of local people Taylor is hired.
Volunteers donated goods and
services are the life's blood of family house.
Oh God bless you.
You're a very sweet true.
And the patient is going for a family house.
Taylor has also received funds from supporters of
faith-based organizations like the Bradley and
Pettit foundations as well as from a few celebrities.
This is one of our gifts from Oprah Winfrey.
She have been very instrumental in helping this
mission survive as well.
You're daughter from Mississippi called about
six o'clock this morning.
That mission has expanded beyond the senior care facility.
You if is also served through an after school program and
in the family house garden.
The vegetable garden are put in by the children in the community
and the seniors that live here.
And as much as we enjoy the fresh vegetables we get from
the gardens the purpose of it is is to bring people together.
The garden occupies a space where a drug house once stood.
So this house one night burned and when the police came
they told me it was because people were just kind of
hiding out there doing crack and that's why it burned.
So they tore it down and I was able to buy the lot
for a little nothing and we planted flowers there.
Planting seeds of change has become Cordelia
Taylor specialty.
In addition to food grown in the garden,
family house receives donations from second harvest which
they make available to the neighboring community
with certain conditions.
We won't just give about the food and send
somebody out of the door.
We find out how many people are in the house and then we teach
them about proportional cooking.
We find out where do you shop and if there's a better
place to shop we talk about when the sales are on
on that particular day.
It's not just to help people for today but hopefully
it is to change lives.
Another way family house nourishes people and
tries to change lives is called food for thought.
It's a twice monthly free dinner with a speaker who addresses
health care or financial issues.
Is that okay?
You're welcome.
It's a food pretty good.
But you know what?
You think we're channel.
I want to say this.
Does that bet?
Yeah. There you go.
Opening family house to the neighborhood has
taught Taylor about the community's many needs.
One evening in the afterschool program a little girl had a
elevated temperature and I told that said I'm going to take
you home and your mom can call the doctor and she said
we don't have a doctor and I pulled the children in
that room and only one child had a private doctor
and I asked them where do you go to the doctor emergency rooms.
Seeing the need for primary care, Taylor opened
a neighborhood clinic.
Kevin Isard is the clinic physician.
I grew up at neighborhood and I was understood the
mission and and and and probably the mission is that
you know this is it's grassroots this is this is this is
one person touching one person touching one person.
There's my friend.
Hi my friend.
How are you doing?
It would be hard to count the people touched by
Cordelia Taylor but she would tell you she's
just doing her job.
We all here to make it go.
I always tell the maintenance man that if he don't clean the
building then I don't have a job because nobody is going
to come into a dirty building so that means his
job is just as important as my job is to find it.
We all have gifts and God expects us to use those gifts.
God is not coming down here to do anything.
He put us here to do it and he expects us to help
each other and that's what we should be about
doing. We ask the gubernatorial
candidates what they do on the issue of
health care for seniors.
Democratic incumbent candidate Jim Doyle said he'd expand
family care statewide.
Family care allows seniors and people with
disabilities to receive care in their communities
rather than a nursing home.
Doyle also supports the senior care program
which provides senior citizens with affordable
prescription drugs.
Green party candidate Nelson Isman said he'd expand
badger care to include what Medicare doesn't cover for
seniors and make health care a public utility
so high prescription costs wouldn't be an issue.
Republican party candidate Mark Green said he'd support
Wisconsin senior care program and health savings accounts that
would allow people to set aside money to pay for medical care
with the funds being carried over from year to year.
One last note about Cordelia Taylor, she's receiving the
AARP impact award this December along with former
presidents Clinton and Bush.
She also tells us that her organization is purchasing
the city block where family houses located.
They plan to put up a community center for area children
and the medical clinic.
Taylor hopes to have this completed within the next year.
Wisconsin cranberry farmers are currently in full harvest mode.
This year the state has expected to produce 3.5 million
barrels of the tart red fruit.
In fact we're expected to lead the nation in
cranberry production for the 12th consecutive year.
Reporter Andy Soth caught up with one cranberry farmer
out of Wisconsin Rapids, whose recent innovation is
contributing to the success of this year's harvest.
If you've never seen cranberries harvested before
you might not know that's what Dan Rockman is doing.
But even veteran cranberry growers would wonder how exactly
he's harvesting the berries.
I always figured that there's a better way to
do just about any job just to be able
to figure it out.
But Rockman's figured out they revolutionized
the cranberry industry.
I think that within three to five years the vast
majority of the crops will be harvested with this machine.
Rockman's machine is called the Ruby Slipper, named
for the way it slips the Ruby Red Fruit off the vine.
Cranberry vine with the berries on is hit by this bar and
the berries get stripped off and the vine just slides
through underneath.
The fruit that's picked off the vine floats in a flooded bog.
It's routed up, cleaned, and sent for processing into
juice or into cranberry sauce.
Or the berries can be dried and sweetened.
Long ago, cranberries were picked by hand.
Then growers developed hand rakes to strip the
fruit from the vine.
After World War II, growers like Carl Getzinger and Bob Case
developed the first mechanical pickers that still
bear their names.
It's been the cranberry tradition that growers
develop their own equipment.
In the whole scheme I just called their cranberries
are pretty small business.
They're probably maybe less than a thousand about a
thousand cranberry growers in the whole United States.
So a company, John Deere or something like that
probably isn't going to manufacture specific
dedicated cranberry equipment.
But Rockman's business partner, a small family business in
Wisconsin Rapids, called BDT, does specialize in
cranberry equipment.
We're centrally located in Wisconsin, so we
get a lot of the growers that are just in this
this regional area that are coming to us for
different applications and throughout the years
of working with these people we've developed
different products for them.
Dix says the ruby slipper can do the job about five times
faster than this machine, called the water
wheel or a beater.
The beater has been standard equipment for about the
last quarter century.
A nice thing with this machine too is its simplicity.
There's a lot less moving parts, a lot less things
that could potentially break.
And it's also a lot easier on the cranberry plants
themselves and on the fruit.
Rockman says the individual spring-mounted feet
on the slipper mean it can better handle
uneven terrain, getting berries of beater misses
and produce a higher yield.
And unlike the old beater, the ruby slipper is an
implement that attaches to a conventional farm tractor.
I didn't want a dedicated piece of equipment that sat in the
shed for 11 or 11 half months out of the year to only
be used at harvest.
While the ruby slipper is a new technology, it is part of a long
tradition of cranberry growers inventing their own tools.
But unlike Getzinger and Case, Rockman won't
name it for himself.
I don't name things after me.
I want to name people remember.
Everyone remembers ruby slipper.
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Dan Brockman tells us that so far this year he's
sold about 20 of his ruby slipper harvesting machines
to farmers as far away as New Jersey and British Columbia.
That's our program for this week.
We leave you with a trip to natural bridge state park in
Sauc County.
Artifacts have been found near the 35-foot
high sandstone bridge, leading to estimates that the
area was inhabited as long as 10 to 12,000 years ago.
Enjoy our visual postcard and for in Wisconsin, I'm
Patty Lo.
See you next time.
[Music]
Major funding for in Wisconsin is provided by
the people of a lion's energy who bring safe, reliable and
environmentally friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods
and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
A lion's energy, offering energy saving
ideas on the web.
UW Health providing specialty
and primary care for all ages throughout Wisconsin.
Information on UW Health Physicians and
Clinics and on University Wisconsin Hospital is
available on the web.
And Wisconsin's technical colleges,
providing the people of Wisconsin with the
knowledge and skills they'll need for the economy
of tomorrow.
Wisconsin's technical colleges,
communities first.
Additional support for coverage of the Great Lakes is provided
by the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program and
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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