Free webcast for journalists TODAY at 2 p.m. ET will explore rural use of health-insurance exchanges

If you lack health insurance, you're more likely to live in a rural area. Put another way, if you're rural, you're more likely to lack health insurance. Nearly one in five uninsured Americans live in rural areas, while only a sixth of the U.S. population does. For those reasons, the federal health-reform law is especially important to rural areas, but "In the launch of health insurance exchanges across the country, one issue that has not been explored much is how the marketplaces will affect rural Americans," says the Association of Health Care Journalists. So, AHCJ is holding a webcast at 2 p.m. ET Thursday to explore how rural Americans will use the health-insurance exchanges that opened Oct. 1.

The panelists will be Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, which publishes Kentucky Health News and The Rural Blog; Alan Morgan, CEO of the National Rural Health Association; and Jim Doyle, who covers the business of health care for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. AHCJ health-insurance topic leader Joseph Burns will serve as moderator.

Viewers of the one-hour webcast will be able to ask questions after the panelists' initial presentations. Registration is not required for the free webcast; a link to it will appear on this AHCJ web page shortly before the webcast begins.