Sharing Bills Cheaper than Insurance

The ever-increasing cost of health insurance inspired us to go looking for a new plan recently. But a conversation last week with a medical professional proved to be a real eye-opener.

He told me the major medical health plan he and his wife had was about to increase from roughly $1,300 a month to $3,500 a month (for those keeping score at home, that’s a nearly 275% increase).

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Use a Christian health-cost sharing plan,” he said. “It’s about all we can do.”

I understand. If my wife and I were not on a Medicare Advantage plan, we would still be using a cost-sharing plan. Two of them provided our “insurance” coverage for more than 20 years.

Sharing Costs

I put that word in quotes because, technically speaking, sharing plans aren’t insurance. That’s why they are careful to avoid any suggestion of guarantees, saying only they will share bills for payment.

In some cases, the terminology causes confusion. The afternoon before my double-bypass surgery in January of 2008, my heart surgeon’s assistant called. She had talked to the sharing plan office and was upset by their statement they couldn’t guarantee his bill would be paid.

“It’s going to be $80,000” she said.

Alarmed, I called the office to ask if there was a problem.

“If you’re supposed to be at the hospital at 5:30 in the morning for heart surgery, I would be,” the woman who answered the phone replied.

I think it was a misunderstanding. The bill must have been paid, because I never heard another word from the surgeon. I know my $31,000 hospital bill was covered, because the sharing plan sent me a list of all the related invoices they had paid.

Truly Helping Others

The concept is basic: members pay a monthly amount—known as a share—to help other Christians pay medical expenses.

For anyone reading these words who is forking over a small fortune for insurance, I would run to the nearest laptop or smartphone and start searching.

In a way, the share system is just like health insurance, with deductibles, no coverage of pre-existing conditions, and other wrinkles.

The key difference in this age of skyrocketing health-care inflation: monthly shares are measured in the hundreds of dollars instead of the thousands becoming commonplace with traditional insurance.

What’s more, many plans encourage members to pray for other members.

The most recent one I participated in also maintained a program that allowed people to send money beyond their monthly share to help pay others’ non-covered expenses. Those usually stemmed from pre-existing conditions.

Generosity in Action

Before joining, I hesitated to sign up because of their first-year limitation on heart-related expenses. Having just undergone a heart stent procedure that totaled $33,000, I held off for a couple of years, afraid of incurring another expensive heart problem.

Once I switched in a necessary move to cut monthly obligations, I discovered this program regularly helped pay folks’ pre-existing expenses—some as high as $100,000. I felt foolish for having been deterred by the prospect of another stent going bad.

Now, this isn’t to say that charlatans don’t operate in this area. The founders of one of the first major plans of this kind went to prison for embezzlement. In recent years, I read online about a supposed share plan scamming unsuspecting participants.

That’s why “caveat emptor” applies here. But I regularly chat with people who aren’t even aware that health-cost-sharing plans exist. Now would be the time to learn more about them.