Health Care Sharing Ministries: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

moving on our main story tonight concerns healthcare the field responsible for repairing organs treating cancer and removing foreign objects from rectums which have recently included a plastic turtle a fork six magic markers and a cat toy bell which credit where it's due is the most promising advancement in cat hiding places since under the dresser access to healthcare is a big problem in america and one of the key reasons is that health insurance is often linked to employment why is that the case well because we do it wrong there is a right way to do it but we don't do it that way we do it the wrong way and this is a particular problem at the moment because employment is still down 7.6 million jobs from its pre-pandemic level all of which means that many are struggling to find healthcare coverage right now so they might be intrigued if they stumble on an ad like this my health care costs were gonna double this year doubled doubled it was down to health care or my student loans i found a better way it's neighbors helping neighbors liberty health share it's freedom from insurance at liberty health share we support each other and keep health costs down we're changing the way you're paying for health care this is the way it should be we're all in this together together well hold on because i'm not sure how together you all are what i saw there was a bunch of people together with warm lens flares and then one weird older man very much on his own in black and white he's in a slightly different thing and we're not going to say why but on some level i think we all know that ad is for something called a health care sharing ministry and if you haven't heard of them before you may have come across one and not even realized it because they have been growing fast in the us and the key phrase in that ad is freedom from insurance because the most important thing to know about health care sharing ministries or hcsms isn't just that they can be cheaper than health insurance which they can is that they are also not health insurance generally they are non-profits where people who share religious beliefs usually christianity agree to help cover each other's medical bills here is a heartwarming story about what one of them looks like in practice we're praying for a young lady named kimberly bob stedman and his family are praying for someone they've never met she had a shunt installed in her brain they've also prepared a card with a check for 561 dollars to bear her burden by sending them some money a scene like this plays out here once a month it does take a measure of faith to do it we are sharing this is so different than what we're used to in our society he's right people actually looking out for each other does sound better than our current system which is get sick have insurance decline coverage and then hope debra messing retweets your gofundme that's great deborah but did you donate did you did you debra and it does feel more personal sending 500 a month to a stranger in need than to a company that sounds like someone made up a word after getting a shitty scrabble hand perhaps that is why the local news team who covered that story seemed so moved after it ended i mean can you imagine being that person and getting the check you know not knowing that someone was going to help you and then suddenly you have all this help right it's all about faith isn't it faith that it's going to get paid faith in god and it's just amazing it's incredible yeah of course they're into this faith strangers coming together throw in a runaway dog who found his owner in the hospital even though he'd never been to the hospital and you've got yourself a schedule one local news thirst trap and hcsms are definitely an alternative but as you've probably guessed because you're learning about them on this show and not what if john oliver was somehow less angry less english and had jack ryan money there are also some significant drawbacks which depending on the company in question can range from the disquieting to the disqualifying so tonight let's talk about healthcare sharing ministries what they are what they do and more importantly what they don't do and the first thing to know is hcsms have actually existed in the united states for decades traditionally serving small insular communities like mennonites and the amish however the 2010 affordable care act included a loophole that exempted uninsured people from paying the tax penalty if they were a member of an hcsm and that was clearly immediately appealing to anyone who wanted to opt out of obamacare in fact some htsms like liberty healthcare one of the biggest ministries have specifically targeted a conservative audience liberty has run ads on the blaze and also sponsored cpac in fact remember that famous moment when trump molested the flag the liberty logo was an eyewitness to that crime and liberty even made its sales pitch directly to the cpac audience during panels like this one if you want the government to take care of you and you think they do a great job doing it health sharing is not for you if you want to stick it to them sign up for liberty healthcare [Applause] okay on a list of the worst sounds known to man self-satisfied cpac laughter has to be right at the top beat only by weeping kitten and mother's orgasm now that affordable care act loophole did try to put some limits in place to keep things from getting out of hand it stated that your ministry or crucially a predecessor of it had to have been in continuous existence since 1999 but unfortunately that predecessor detail left room for exploitation because new ministries simply started affiliating themselves with previously existing churches take one called trinity health share it was founded in 2018 which is and this is true after 1999 but it argued that it's still qualified because it derived its existence from the baptist church which has been in existence and continually sharing since the 1600s which is obvious it's like me claiming that this show has been around for 13 billion years because the big bang was also a bright expanse containing extremely dense material that's just not how anything works so a loophole that was intended to be small got pretty big and even bigger once obamacare's individual mandate stopped being enforced during the trump years and the result of all of this was that the popularity of these ministries exploded from an estimated 200 000 members a decade ago to more than a million today and while hesms will insist that they make it abundantly clear that they are not health insurance many do seem to go out of their way to make themselves appear as insurance-like as possible for start they're sometimes sold through insurance brokers alongside actual insurance plans and while the obamacare marketplace offers plans in four metal categories bronze silver gold and platinum a company called altoa offered plans in gold silver bronze and copper rebranding them last year to diamond emerald sapphire and ruby although it is still pretty clear what they're trying to do there very much blur the line while also throwing some extremely unfair shade at ruby the objective goat of the cardinal gems she's red known for her flaws and responsible for the most iconic slippers in the history of cinema eat your hearts out sapphire and emeralds because you could literally never but while these hcsms may have the optics of insurance there are some very important differences for start they don't have to abide by laws governing insurance products meaning there is nothing stopping them from placing restrictions on coverage for pre-existing conditions which is exactly what they do and not only that many won't cover services considered essential under the aca like treatment for substance abuse or mental health care in fact ultra excludes those and also treatment for obesity or autism and samaritan's classic plan has a list of non-qualified items including routine maintenance stabilized preventive and wellness care that is everything from regular checkups to vaccinations and even for eligible expenses the most that can be shared for a given need is 250 thousand dollars which probably explains their full name samaritan not the good one though just a random samaritan who might well leave you to die in the middle of an abandoned road and we haven't even gotten to one of the biggest excuses htsms can use to deny coverage and that is morality because that means that you can be denied coverage for basically anything this is a program of the christian care ministry and people who smoke or same-sex couples need not apply the program also won't pay for illnesses related to alcohol abortion or other lifestyle related choices i need to know that i'm not going to be paying for someone else who's decided to sit on the couch and eat bonbons all day wow that is harsh but i will say that judgmental tone is very much in line with how these ministries operate do people really deserve healthcare coverage if they eat junk food or don't exercise or are gay just fix it eat a carrot go for a run rub your penis or vagina on someone else's vagina or penis respectively it's really not difficult and this is a pattern across hcsm's liberty's materials say an applicant must comply with a christian lifestyle and among the exclusions on samaritan's classic program you'll find that they might pay for treatment for an std but not if it was contracted by sex outside of marriage and that the member has to explain how the disease was contracted presumably the hotter the story the more money you get for ointments vanilla missionary isn't going to get covered here bud you better have gotten gonorrhea from an earlobe if you want samaritan's attention but sweeping moral judgment isn't the only leeway that these organizations have because they are voluntary associations you have no guarantee that your bills will get paid although to hear a founder of liberty health share tell it you've really got nothing to worry about there just listen to him reassure people in a video on their website titled will my bills be paid we've had a successful history of sharing medical bills 100 for every eligible need ever submitted so it doesn't depend upon a written contract where we can sue each other if someone doesn't send their share amount it's really a contract written on our hearts all right it's a contract written on your heart figuratively of course because literally it's not a contract and as for his claim there that liberty successfully shared a hundred percent of medical bills for every eligible need given as we've discussed they can deem any need ineligible for any reason that phrase is essentially as meaningless as their cardiac non-contract and on top of all of this there is the practical matter of how exactly you pay for your care as a member the hsn process typically is you're told to present yourself as uninsured then when you get your bill the expectation is that you bargain down the cost of your care as much as you can then pay the bill yourself then submit your bills to the ministry for reimbursement and if you have ever waited for your friends to venmo you after paying for dinner you know that the reimbursement process can go very wrong participants in liberty you know the one with the heart contract have found payments can be slow to non-existent in the past three years tiffany schultz with the wisconsin better business bureau says the bbb has taken more than 500 complaints about liberty health share many with similar stories one claiming 90 thousand in outstanding medical bills that were pre-approved either the consumer is out the money and hasn't been reimbursed or they're ending up going to collections that's not great and while liberty claims that 2019 was a particularly difficult year and they are proud of the improvements they've made since then it is worth noting that liberty's members still seem pretty active on the better business bureau website where they've logged 304 complaints in the last 12 months which is a lot especially when you consider that cigna a massive insurer has just half that amount while having 15 times the members and imagine having more people complain about you than about cigna a company whose logo is a cartoon man standing in a field as his head explodes from dealing with their customer service and unfortunately in most states a complaint to the better business bureau is basically all the recourse you have and these ministries have worked very hard to keep accountability at bay successfully lobbying for so-called safe harbor laws in more than 30 states ensuring that they can operate safely outside of insurance regulations and to see just how much you can get away with it's worth looking at a company called alera which has been heavily involved with a number of health sharing ministries over the years first one called unity then one called trinity which now goes by charity although those names sound less like healthcare organizations are more like characters in a religious themed captain planet knock-off when their powers combine they get cancelled after two episodes alira presents itself as merely an administrator for hcsms but it is intricately connected to the ones that it works with and very much by design just six weeks after trinity was incorporated it signed a deal with alera stipulating that alira would have exclusive ownership rights to the membership roster and was the sole party developing and marketing the plans including the htsm component so aller's relationship with trinity is basically this guy's relationship to his alien costume he can claim he isn't technically the costume and that's true but the costume doesn't really do anything without him and customers in multiple states have claimed that elira and its ministries have been ruthless in denying coverage wielding morality clauses hard when one member was attacked and knocked unconscious outside a bar and taken to the hospital with serious injuries including a skull fracture cervical spine fracture and intercranial bleeding alira denied her claims stating her injuries were self-inflicted and citing their guidelines including the line follow spiritual teachings on the use or abuse of alcohol which i'm pretty sure is the benevolent advice jesus himself would have given under the circumstances and incredibly that's not even the worst story of a rejected claim involving a lira ten-year-old lola gray seegers is healthy just four months after brain surgery on september 11 she was rushed from the local er in greene county by ambulance to children's health care scottish right where doctors removed a softball sized brain tumor it was just amazing the care but last week came the bill from their health plan alera companies 325 thousand 624. alera says children's is out of network and won't pay the 325 thousand dollar bill we had a life-threatening emergency they failed us and her holy they were denied reimbursement for a child who had a softball-sized tumor removed from her brain which is incidentally exactly the kind of immoral behavior i'd expect sharing ministries to classify as disqualifying now alira claims that that family's issues were ultimately resolved but only after that story was featured on the news and it shows just how little recourse you have that if you don't have a child that you can get onto tv to shame the company into action you could be out of luck and look traditional insurance companies also have their share of horror stories when it comes to denial of coverage but there are important differences here not just in the level of protection that you have when that happens but in the degree of financial accountability because while the aca requires actual health insurance to spend no more than 20 of money on administrative costs therefore leaving at least 80 percent for care there is no such requirement for hcsms and you can probably tell where this is going because investigations have found that out of every hundred dollars a trinity member paid in premiums only 16 went towards paying medical expenses with the rest being kicked up to a lira and paying out 16 of the money that you take in for coverage is a lot different than paying out 80 because 80 makes you think wait why exactly do we have insurance companies whereas 16 makes you think is a crime happening to me right now and if so why does everyone seem okay with it and when a local news reporter caught up with the head of elira to ask her about his reluctance to pay out claims her response was not particularly reassuring do you have any apologies to the members who believe their claims ought to be played and they're not paid we're not a health care sharing ministry mr strickland we only administer on behalf of the ministries i can't help you any further i need to get out of town okay it is never a good sign when a ceo has to end an interview like that as i've said before our company has never done anything illegal now have you seen a man in a blue fedora he's supposed to give me a new identity as i get pulled into a helicopter that's already taking off tell my daughter i loved her and my husband i didn't i'm out now i should say other sharing ministries have tried to distance themselves from illyria claiming that this sort of deception is not part of legitimate authentic healthcare sharing ministries and alira is definitely bad but one thing insurance commissioners have repeatedly told us in researching this piece is how little transparency there is into how these ministries operate and just how weary they think people should be of all of them and look broadly we have to do more in this country to reduce the cost of healthcare personally i'd argue switching to a single-payer system would remove a lot of these problems instantly but that clearly isn't happening anytime soon so in the meantime i do get the appeal of lower-cost health insurance the problem is this isn't that it's not insurance at all and states need at the very least to pass laws to make sure that people know what they're getting into with hcsms and to force them to allocate funds properly the problem is some are going in the opposite direction take florida in 2018 after intense lobbying it loosened its restrictions on hsms even further going from requiring that participants be members of the same religion to merely requiring that they share a common set of ethical or religious beliefs and that could be basically anything at this point the barter entry is so low just about anyone can become an hcsm and the reason i know that is this anyone did you may remember back in 2015 we founded a church our lady of perpetual exemption to demonstrate that tax exemptions for churches enabled some of them to do terrible things well just three months ago we officially founded a spin-off church called our lady of perpetual health and we founded it where else but florida and i'm happy to tell you that church now has its own health care sharing ministry johnny care and the whole thing was scarily easy to do so without further ado please join me my most blessed congregants at church and you know i couldn't run an organization as important as this ministry all by myself so please welcome live from johnny care headquarters in sunny florida the felicity huffman to my william h macy my dear wife and business partner wanda joe praise me to you my wonder praise be to you my john and praise be to florida that blessed state where minimally regulated insurance knockoffs go to be born and retired people go to die amen to that i have heard the word of the lord my john oh and what did it say my wonder it said thou must free thyself like a gazelle from the hand of the hunter from the overreaching grasp of government healthcare stick it to him stick it to him now wanda we're running the ministry as a church even though in florida we actually don't have to be amen praise florida but we do need to fulfill the requirement that our ministry provide for the financial or medical needs of a participant through contributions from other participants the good news is we have done that through our special johnny care first aid kit containing not one not two but three band-aids it screams the cheapest option that we could find and you know what rwanda what my john it was now why three band-aids because we know that in life sometimes accidents happen but if they happen more than three times it just stops being our problem and let me be clear when you sign up for membership you're not paying for your own first aid kit you're paying for someone else's and they are paying for yours and that gives you freedom from insurance and us freedom from responsibility and beyond that it's a very simple system if you need medical care you go to the doctor you receive it you request a bill and then you pay that bill on your own leave us out of it oh yeah because if you submit that bill to us we're gonna reject it from his lips to god's bigger lips in the sky testify either because you engaged in the sin of fornication beyond the bonds of matrimony you're whoring little skis or you spent the day eating bon bons on the couch instead of going to the gym or masturbate it ever whatever it is we're going to reject it and it's as easy as that no deductibles no claims and no contracts except for the one written on our hearts now you can become a member of our johnny care ministry for just 1.99 and we're limiting membership to 5 000 of you in florida not because we have to but because that is the number of first aid kits that we've bought so go to freedomfromhealthcare.org and see if you qualify to send us money and get almost nothing in return as close to nothing as we could get away with and to be clear we should not be able to get away with any of this thank you to wanda joe who if history is any indication will disappear for three years and ultimately resurfacing the canadian mohegan sun answering to deb i just love you so much my wanda oh and i love you so much my john visit freedomfromhealthcare.org to learn how you can stick it to him stick it to him that's our show thank you so much for watching good night you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 5,013,599

Keywords:

Id: oFetFqrVBNc

Length: 22min 53sec (1373 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Blucrunch]

Here's part of his wonderful health sharing ministry site he set up in beautiful, free Florida.

(...) we have deemed the medical needs below as ineligible for sharing:

EMERGENCY MEDICAL CARE

NONEMERGENCY MEDICAL CARE

PREEXISTING CONDITIONS

EXISTING CONDITIONS

I wonder if I go get treatment for a nonexisting condition if they'll be on the hook?

[u/LeonardBruce12]

Oh great, another thing to make me upset :)

[u/allkill]

What I started doing is when a new episode gets published, I don't watch it early in the morning. I watch it late at night so it ruin my night not the entire day

[u/ThorsHammeroff]

I couldn't even watch this. I saw the word "ministries" in the title card and knew it'd be another depressing look into how a religious organization is scamming gullible vulnerable people out of their money, and how our government is helpless to stop them and unwilling to meet the victims' healthcare needs in better ways.

It's fucking depressing, and I can't take it anymore.

[u/RagingNerdaholic]

Mirror because dumbass region-blocking

[u/phantom__fear]

Americans are so afraid of socialist programms, they literally steal the idea, make it worse and then call it some shit like "liberty something something" or "freedum etc etc".

Man, you guys are masochists over there...

[u/yesmaybeyes]

He is such a witty ham.

[u/SongForPenny]

Democrats control the House of Representatives, and the Presidency. The public wants single payer by a wide margin. It’s even pretty popular among Republicans. We are in a global pandemic.

So ... where’s that single payer healthcare they’ve been promising since the 1940s? (yes, it has been that long)

We’re 6 months into this administration, there’s a pandemic, and there is NO public talk by leaders about M4A. They aren’t going to do it. They’re simply liars. If they give us healthcare, they won’t be able to use the hollow ‘promise’ of healthcare as a wedge issue.

Obama’s Democrats had control of the House, The Senate, the Presidency, and a moderate-left Supreme Court. What did he choose to do about single payer? He shit on us. He gave us a Republican plan, worked out by the Heritage Foundation and insurance companies.

The Democrats WILL NOT give you healthcare.

They will, however, stand in the way and block any movement that tries to get healthcare for you.