Health-care fault line in rural counties

Philadelphia Inquirer, The, June, 2008 by Amy Worden Inquirer Staff Writer

MANSFIELD, Pa. - Rural Tioga County sprawls across more than 1,100 square miles along the New York border in the north-central section of Pennsylvania. Like many other depressed areas, it suffers from high unemployment, low income and high rates of chronic disease. But it has far fewer employers than do most urban sections of the state, and most businesses are too small to offer health insurance to their employees.

The net result? Tioga has a higher percentage of uninsured (35.6 percent) residents than any other county in the state, according to the Pennsylvania Insurance Department. While Gov. Rendell and the General Assembly are hashing out a compromise on competing health-care proposals to provide insurance coverage to more Pennsylvanians, many uninsured residents of...