Less Stressed Life: Helping You Heal Yourself

#259 Lower Cost Health Insurance Alternatives with Christa Biegler, RD

October 07, 2022 Christa Biegler
Less Stressed Life: Helping You Heal Yourself
#259 Lower Cost Health Insurance Alternatives with Christa Biegler, RD
Show Notes Transcript

Welcome to the Less Stressed Life, where we help women and families overcome fatigue, food sensitivities and inflammation the goal here is really to help you heal yourself. 


Right now is the last time 1:1 coaching applications will be open for the rest of the year. If you need another set of eyes on your case or you're ready to get rid of some common but not normal symptoms, book a time for a case review session at christabiegler.com/fss if you want to move in the right direction by Christmas 


Leave a review:

https://reviewthispodcast.com/lessstressedlife


Have a question you want answered on the podcast? christabiegler.com/questions



On this episode: 

  • Ethical concerns about contributing to health insurance from working in high dollar healthcare
  • Insurance doesn’t cover my services
  • Cost difference
  • Cost sharing model of "health insurance" alternatives
  • You are responsible for paying a certain monthly share amount similar to how you would pay a monthly insurance premium
    • The amount paid per month is determined based on household size, age, where you live, annual unshared amount, and the program plan


Covered these Health Sharing Organizations: 

  • Christian Healthcare 
  • Samaritan Ministries 
  • KNEW Health
  • Medi-Share
  • Altrua Health 
  • Liberty Healthshare 
  • United Refuah Healthshare



This episode is sponsored by RUPA Health, my favorite lab concierge service that brings over 25 different functional medicine labs to one dashboard and saves me loads of time with it’s amazing interface and saves my clients money by being a low cost blood lab facilitating option.  If you're a health practitioner, get a free account at https://www.rupahealth.com and let them know I sent you! 

Christa Biegler (00:01):
Welcome to the Less Stress Life podcast, where we help women and families overcome fatigue, food sensitivities, and inflammation. The goal here is really to help you help yourself. If you find this show or episode helpful, please repay the favor and share it with a friend or lead me review on the purple podcast app if that's where you listen. I'm your host Christa Beigler, integrative dietician nutritionist in lover of all the foods and my chickens. And right now is the last time one-on-one coaching applications will be open for the rest of the year. So if you need another set of eyes on your case or you're ready to get rid of some common but not normal symptoms, book a time for a case review session www.christabiegler.com.Com/Fss if you want to move in the right direction by Christmas. This episode is also sponsored by Rupa Health, my favorite lab concierge service that brings over 25 different functional medicine labs into one dashboard and saves me loads of time with its amazing and easy interface and saves my client's money by being a Lowcost Blood Lab facilitating option.

Christa Biegler (01:06):
If you're a health practitioner, you can get a free account@rupahealth.com and let them know I sent you. They even have a section that shows you where you can order what you can order depending on your licensing credentials and your state. So today I'm talking to you about health sharing 1 0 1. Now I'll get into what health sharing is in a moment, but I wanna share where this kind of came from for me. Many years ago there was a huge change in the healthcare <laugh> system, as I'm sure I don't have to explain to you with the Affordable Care Act. And at that time, the cost of health insurance increased a quite a bit and what was happening also at that time was my husband's employer was counseled to not provide health insurance in the way that they had been providing it because they could be getting fined.

Christa Biegler (01:52):
So we ended up with someone not paying our health insurance and when I was faced to pay it on my own and the cost had gone up a lot, I, it was really stressing me out because I worked in conventional healthcare still about eight years ago and I had a lot of ethical concerns. First of all, insurance didn't really cover the services that I provide. Basically you had to be very, very sick to have, you know, to have diabetes or renal disease, at least in the state I lived in to have insurance coverages. And then I was surrounded by people abusing insurance or a version of insurance and the stories would probably make you fall over. But essentially all that's all I could see was just like all the abuse happening in insurance. And of course I was in a place where I was working with pretty sick people and I have a lot of family members that are in health insurance and they would tell me stories about abusive insurance and I just could ethically not contribute to this very, very broken system.

Christa Biegler (02:47):
It was so stressful at the time, the cost looked something like $15,000 per year for my family plus a $5,000 deductible. And so it was looking like I've gotta pay the insurance company about 20 grand a year before they do much more than an office visit. And quite honestly, I wasn't even really interested in going to an office visit because most people in healthcare, I think we try to stay and, and those that are kind of health savvy, we try to stay out of the office unless we absolutely need it. So I really was feeling just conflicted with supporting this very broken system. And I turned to health sharing. So health sharing is not insurance, but it can be kind of used like insurance, it's cost sharing. So the concern is, oh my gosh, if I don't have health insurance, what happens if I have this, this and this experience?

Christa Biegler (03:36):
Well, to put it simply, health sharing is where you contribute to essentially a pool that goes into an escrow account. This is how most health sharing companies, I wouldn't call them companies, but some of them are called ministries and I've got one that's not a ministry or not Christian based here to share with you as well, but they're consider, a lot of them call themselves ministries. You contribute to a pool, it goes into a, in a pooled account. And then you ask for, you submit claims based on the parameters of your particular plan or how much you put in if you need it. So it's cost sharing, it's people pooling resources and then asking for that reimbursement when it is appropriate. It's been around for a long, long time well before the Affordable Care Act and it became massively popular at that time. It's a totally legitimate and legal alternative to health insurance.

Christa Biegler (04:27):
It was designed to just really stop wasting money on healthcare coverage that's never used, but to still help protect people against really catastrophic medical costs. So health sharing again is just provided by organizations where members share medical costs. So the organizations individually decide what medical expenses they're gonna share within the membership community and how bills are paid. So most health sharing organizations are non-profit and most of them, not all were originally founded on Christian principles, but some programs have moved to a more community focus and some are non-religious overall. So organizations accept members based on similar beliefs or ideologies and they all kind of vary a little bit. But depending on the organization requirements, you may or may not have to declare some Christian basis or values. And you may have to abide by certain lifestyle requirements, meaning you're not using drugs or tobacco or you're using alcohol with kind of moderation.

Christa Biegler (05:25):
The goal there is is to decrease the expenses around these types of lifestyle choices. So we wanna overall share the cost of healthcare but reduce healthcare costs in general. So I know what you're really thinking is what does this actually cost? And I'll, I'll give a couple of costs as I go through these different health sharing organizations, but I already shared that it looked something like 15 to 20,000 per year for not a ton of coverage when I was looking at health insurance. But at the time it was was $255 for my family of five with my children and my husband. And over the years, over the eight years, that price has increased to I think about $360 overall. And I have been very fortunate that I really haven't had to use it. I have paid some things out of pocket, very few and we do a lot of care.

Christa Biegler (06:20):
Maybe physical therapy or chiropractic that I probably could submit and I probably will this year. But a lot of things. And my husband had a procedure once, so it was about a thousand dollars. My son, I had took him in to get an x-ray last month it was about $250. So my other daughter had an x-ray last month, they were having a having a moment and that was about 600 because I'd gone into the emergency room. What happens when you pay cash pay as the prices go down quite a bit compared usually to when you are insurance pay. Once you submit something to insurance, they add on a lot of costs typically. So some of the health sharing organizations ask you to ask the medical establishment or medical facility to pay cash pay. And so sometimes I can get 50% deduction. Sometimes it's a 10% discount, sometimes that's a 20% just depending on where I am.

Christa Biegler (07:09):
I live in a pretty rural area and so I'm kind of just at the mercy of what I have around me. So how do health sharing things work? Well, first of all, you're responsible for paying a certain monthly share just like you would pay on a monthly insurance premium. That amount per month is just based on household size, age where you live and just the program plan, a lot of them have kind of just laid out on the website and they've got a lot of different parameters. So you're also responsible for any unshared amount of your medical expenses. So it doesn't automatically cover everything. I think the one I'm on, it covers anything over $500 for the year. And so after I hit $500, I can then ask to have it shared and then reimburse to me with the health sharing ministry that I use.

Christa Biegler (07:55):
I pay for my fees upfront and then I can go and submit a need or a request for having the organization share those, those costs and then have them submit that back to me. But some other organizations, you give them the card at the time I'll talk about altrua, is kind of like that. They will actually be the middleman in between there and actually help pay for it up front is my understanding because health sharing is becoming so common. Some providers just accept a health sharing card and do the in between. But when a provider does not accept a health sharing plan, you just pay again out of pocket. And the health share organization reimburses the expense if it's an approved medical need. So some of the benefits of health sharing that I don't even think about anymore because of the way insurance has changed is that you can choose the providers you want to see.

Christa Biegler (08:46):
There aren't network requirements. You can enroll any time throughout the year. There's no enrollment period, which is great and it will cover services and programming that health insurance maybe does not. So my services, which are under registered dietician, most health sharing companies or ministries or whatever, they have covered our services with the unofficial receipt and I've seen some health sharing ministries even talk about sharing adoption and funeral services and you just do not see that from insurance at this especially lower cost. So let me get into a handful of these different organizations so you can write them down and do some research if this seems like it might be a fit for you. Currently there's over a hundred health sharing ministries. I'm gonna cover five to seven of them. So some of the ones that are very popular that I've encountered is the one that I use, which is Christian Healthcare Ministries.

Christa Biegler (09:39):
And to be honest, out of the three that I knew about eight or nine years ago, I just picked the one that was the cheapest <laugh>. So it, Christian Healthcare Ministries or chm has been around for over 40 years. They have three different plans to choose from. I believe they're like bronze, gold, silver. I told you how mine started at $255 eight years ago and now it's up to $360. And I just got an email that it's gonna go up again. It typically doesn't cover like minor issues. It, like I said, you've gotta spend maybe $500 per year based on the plan that I'm particularly on. And before they'll start to cover cover visits. Overall, they don't have a lot of restrictions based on health history. Some organizations are gonna limit based on your history overall and they're considered a charity by the Better Business Bureau.

Christa Biegler (10:28):
So that's Christian Healthcare Ministries. Next is Samaritan Ministries. They just have a couple of plans to choose from. I have many clients that have had both Samaritan and chm and they've been really good about covering our services. They have biblical based membership guidelines. A lot of members are of the evangelical faith is what they say on their site, but I don't think it really matters and it should go without saying that you're kind of responsible for this. These things change a lot, right? So you wanna go out to each of these different sites and kind of price compare and you know, look at the different functionalities or or qualities of these different ministries or organizations and choose the one that's right for you. Now a lot of people ask me, what about non-Christian based ones? So there is one that I know of for sure that fits that criteria called New Health.

Christa Biegler (11:17):
It's K N E W. And my friend Megan was sharing how she had just recently switched to that and was really happy and that one really cool thing about them is they pass on some savings for lab work and for supplements and things like that. So they're definitely doing some progressive things that are pretty cool. So I was kind of intrigued when I visited their website. K N E W. Just a couple more. I've got Altrua Ministries. My friend Nicole uses Altrua and has been very happy with them. It's a L T R U A and that's out of Texas and that's the one where I saw they had adoption and funeral sharing. And that's another one where you showed the card at the provider, they sent it to Altrua and you don't actually have to be a middleman necessarily or that's how their website sets it up.

Christa Biegler (12:03):
I know she used it through her pregnancy and it was really great for her. And I do know that the cost varied from about $130 if you're an individual up to the highest was $360 if you had an entire family. Some other popular choices and, and one of the ones that I saw many years ago was Medi-Share. They have four different plans. They have free telehealth. I think that new health also has some telehealth options. So they've got some actually in house provider stuff. Medi-Share actually helps negotiate expenses. They offer some discounts in dental and vision, but not full coverage. Not that you could expect that with any of them. And that one, again, you must commit to actively attending some kind of church. The the other one is Liberty Health Share. So there's three plans to choose from. They offer a lot of discounts on different services and that's also a Christian based one.

Christa Biegler (12:56):
And then the last one is, I hope I don't butcher the name. It's called United Refu a health share. It's United, R e f u a h. And it's the first and only Jewish health sharing organization. So there is Christian Healthcare Ministries, Samaritan New Health, which is not Christian based altrua, which does not, they don't, it doesn't seem that they're very forthcoming with their religious qualifications. They say that they're a unique health sharing ministry that doesn't require a pastor or a representative from a local church to sign an acknowledgement verifying church attendance or validation of medical needs. And I don't remember having to do that either <laugh> when I signed up for Christian Healthcare Ministries. But things change over time. But what you can expect is that in general, when I'm looking at these, the prices do vary from about $130 up to maybe $400 for an entire family.

Christa Biegler (13:51):
So we covered New Samaritan, Christian Healthcare Ministries, altrua Medi-Share, and Liberty Healthcare as well as United Reviewer. So I'm actually about to submit my first claim in a very long time with my daughter's collarbone fracture. And depending on how that goes, and now that I've been doing a little bit of research on this, I'm just gonna kind of check out the marketplace and see if there's a little bit better fit for me as there's some of these really cool ones that offer different perks. There's nothing really wrong with the one I've had, but sometimes it's good to just see if it is the best choice or fit for you and does it cover all the things that you need at this time. So the things to think about with health sharing is that it's a good fit for some people and not for others. So if you have, if you're generally healthy without a lot of preexisting conditions where you don't need ongoing medical care and prescriptions, that might be a good fit.

Christa Biegler (14:42):
If you don't have great insurance access, like my husband and I are both self-employed, so we do not have insurance access through our employers or that you have have missed open enrollment or you think that health insurance is overpriced, <laugh> or expensive or you just want coverage for catastrophic emergencies. You know, most of the time health sharing is gonna cover that. But I think that the benefit is so much greater when it covers services that are not usually covered by insurance. Overall. That's kind of really a pull for me. Keep in mind, even if you do have a preexisting or a chronic condition, you can qualify for being part of a, of a health sharing ministry or organization. There just might be some restrictions or some things that are denied or waiting periods, which obviously check with that individual organization on all of them.

Christa Biegler (15:32):
So there are, I think all of them require an application period and member acceptance and always, always, always reach out to that company to determine their current pricing and coverage. Some are a little more forthcoming than others. And so you can ask or look for which medical services are covered that you might need. Are you planning to have a baby soon or you're interested in some of the other things? What is the annual unshared amount? So for me, I need to pay $500 before they'll share anything. And how much are the charges for administrative and application and overall any other fees that you may not know. Ultimately Health sharing's a really valuable resource for a lot of people that might not realize that there's just more affordable or alternative options to traditional health insurance. And I sure love it because I love that it covers our services.

Christa Biegler (16:15):
So I hope you found this episode helpful. Remember to share it with someone or leave us a podcast review. If you have questions that you wanna submit for a q and a episode, go to krista bigler.com/questions and you can submit your questions in either, either a voice memo or in text. And something else I am trying that I would like to do is I'd like to have, you know, monthly community calls for 30 minutes so I can actually get to know some of you. So right now I'm gonna leave those on the calendar so you can find the most current community call if you go to krista bigler.com/community. And I'll see you later this week.