Dylan Scott

So that's pretty exponential growth if you go back to just like 20 years ago.

So I think it's really important for people to understand these ministries are not subject to the same rules about pre-existing conditions, about not putting annual limits on people's benefits.

All of the insurance regulations that people have gotten accustomed to after the ACA became law do not apply to these ministries.

healthcare cost-sharing ministries.

So you're basically just relying on sort of the goodwill of these ministries to pay out and just like hoping that they have enough money to cover whatever your medical bills may be.

The way that insurance works is it needs scale.

You need a lot of people paying into the pot.

Frankly, you need a lot of people who are healthy, who

don't have serious medical needs, who are just paying their premiums in and not taking anything out.

And that's hard to do sometimes, as we see with rising costs across the whole system with hundreds of thousands or millions of people enrolled in your health insurance plan.

And so you can imagine with some of these smaller healthcare cost-sharing ministries, which individual ones may have

maybe hundreds or just like a few thousand people enrolled, there might not be enough money in that cost-sharing ministry to cover the costs.

And so then, you're kind of just shit out of luck.

The way to solve what's going wrong with our healthcare system is not to scale up these healthcare cost-sharing ministries that can then discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions.

I think instead what we need to do is we need to be looking at the whole system's costs, figuring out how to bring those down, which is hard and which is going to take some difficult work.

But I do not think these plans themselves are the solution.

It's the worst time of year, because it's, yeah, it's like, hey, sign up for health insurance.

And yeah, your premium's probably higher than it was last year.

And, you know, the deductible might be going up too.

And it's like, I think in the long term, we need like policymakers and the industry and the payers to come together and figure out how to make just the overall costs of healthcare lower so that we can provide people with comprehensive coverage more affordably.