Dylan Scott

I think all of those things combined together to start driving a lot more people to these healthcare cost-sharing ministries.

It sounds a lot almost like mutual aid.

Yeah, I think that's the crux of it, I think, in a lot of ways.

But increasingly, these are like sophisticated businesses with really well-funded advertising campaigns.

They've increasingly de-emphasized the religious aspect of it.

You see them adopting names like Liberty HealthShare and things like that.

Even with the moral and ethical standards that they want people to sign on to, they've more and more de-emphasized you have to believe in God and that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior.

It's more like you're going to be an upright person, you're going to be moral, but in a vaguer, more secular way.

And I think that's because these companies see a business opportunity.

How many people use these kinds of ministries?

Back in the day, in the mid-2000s, there were like 200,000 people enrolled in these plans.

As of about 2018, there were a million people enrolled in a cost-sharing.

A pretty significant increase from the decade before.

Then past that, as the most recent estimate that we have, and it's worth emphasizing, because these things are poorly regulated, it's hard to get really reliable data about them because these can just operate without the government even really knowing about it.

But the Colorado Department of Insurance tried again to estimate how many people have joined these ministries in 2023, and they came up with 1.7 million Americans were now enrolled in a healthcare cost-sharing ministry.

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.