I got your Prairie Home Cooperative right here

The New York Times riffs on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” today in the headline to Timothy Egan’s piece on how Western states have long embraced the concept of cooperatives — even health-care cooperatives. Egan didn’t mention that the radio host’s brother, Steven J. Keillor, wrote the book on rural co-ops in Minnesota, from the days when ours was still a Western state up through the 1930s.  

Egan makes a case for cooperatives’ roots out West:

The West is the native ground of co-ops. It’s in our collective DNA. People buy their tents, sleeping bags and bikes from the nation’s largest consumer co-op, REI, founded in Seattle in 1938, now with 3.5 million active members.

Egan notes that another Seattle-area co-op, Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, serves even the most rock-ribbed conservative counties of Idaho. That organization and Minnesota’s HealthPartners are frequently cited models for how co-ops could cure the national health crisis.

But both were built on a concept of mutual assistance and democratic governance developed by grassroots, country cooperatives that Keillor describes in “Cooperative Commonwealth: Co-ops in Rural Minnesota, 1859–1939.”

The most familiar descendant of that era may be Land O’ Lakes, the dairy marketer that proved that Minnesota co-ops could go national, and even international. The less well known farmers’ mutual fire insurance organizations in Keillor’s book are ancestors of the health care co-op idea that Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) has been pushing since June (and which Sen. Amy Klobuchar is now mulling):

Farmers had incentives to organize a polity of the overcharged, bypass the private insurance market, and purchase insurance from themselves in a mutual.

Mutuals were, simply, insurance companies owned and controlled by their policyholders. Some mutuals evolved into profit-maximizing companies and ceased being true, low-cost, policyholder-controlled companies. A farmers’ mutual, however, retained its cooperative, low-cost character.