Dylan Scott

You know, for some people it's like, oh my God, like I broke my leg or I got diagnosed with cancer.

And, you know, you see people go into GoFundMe or Kickstarter, just literally basically begging people, like, please help me with my medical costs.

Unfortunately, that's one predicament that the US healthcare system puts people into if they have a serious medical need is you might just have to beg strangers to chip in to cover your bills.

Short of that, you also have Americans, they're looking for basically insurance-like products, something where it's like you pay a monthly payment and if you have medical bills, hopefully it's going to cover you.

There's a few different variations on that.

There is something called short-term limited duration insurance, which ideally is supposed to be a three-month plan that you get on when you're between jobs or something like that, but some people are trying to go on those on a more permanent basis.

There are things called association health plans, which are supposed to be groups of businesses who pool their resources together to try to cover their workers' healthcare costs.

And then what I think is one of the most interesting ones is something called healthcare cost-sharing ministry.

So, like in their original form, basically what this is, is like a group of people, you know, maybe literally a group of people who go to the same church together, who are like, okay, we're going to pool our money together.

We might ask people who participate to adhere to certain moral, ethical standards that, you know, reflect our Christian values.

And then, like, you know, it's in theory supposed to work like insurance, where it's like you pay into this pot, and if you have a medical claim or some kind of medical issue comes up, you receive healthcare services, you can take those bills back to the group, and they'll give you money out of the pot to cover the costs.

Mm.

Technically, these kinds of arrangements have been around for decades.

The first one started back in the early 1980s.

For a long time, they were really niche.

Then the Affordable Care Act passed and was this big flashpoint politically, as people well know.

especially for like deeply conservative and religiously devout people they had a lot of objections to the ACA some of them had objections to like the provisions that required insurers to cover birth control things like that and so they were like you know what I want to like

opt out of this law.

Actually, the law and the way that it was written gave them an out.

It said that if you sign up for a healthcare cost-sharing ministry, if you're enrolled in something like that, then you can be exempted from the individual mandate.