Just started a new job and got my new Medical Ins rates.....$1080/month for self, wife and kid. This is America....

[rev ronin]

19 minutes ago, AbeTheBabe said:

No pre-existing coverage is a non-starter.

It's a little more nuanced than that, actually. My fault for being too terse.

https://samaritanministries.org/resources/faq

Are pre-existing conditions shareable?

Medical conditions that existed prior to membership are only shareable if the condition has been symptom, treatment, and medication-free for 12 to 24 consecutive months as outlined in the program guidelines. Some pre-existing conditions have a five-year waiting period.

 

So yeah, if I'd had a kidney stone 5 years ago, a new stone would still be shared.  They have specific language covering DM I/II, HTN, and HLP.  There are absolutely people for whom this sort of cost-sharing arrangement is a bad idea.  I don't happen to be one of them.

[iconic]

US Healthcare in a nutshell: thoughts and prayers 

[Cideous]

1 hour ago, rev ronin said:

It's a little more nuanced than that, actually. My fault for being too terse.

https://samaritanministries.org/resources/faq

Are pre-existing conditions shareable?

Medical conditions that existed prior to membership are only shareable if the condition has been symptom, treatment, and medication-free for 12 to 24 consecutive months as outlined in the program guidelines. Some pre-existing conditions have a five-year waiting period.

 

So yeah, if I'd had a kidney stone 5 years ago, a new stone would still be shared.  They have specific language covering DM I/II, HTN, and HLP.  There are absolutely people for whom this sort of cost-sharing arrangement is a bad idea.  I don't happen to be one of them.

Quick question, if I am gay Christian and contract HIV through a mutual relationship.....am I covered by Samaritan insurance?

Edited May 28, 2021 by Cideous

[iconic]

1 minute ago, Cideous said:

Quick question, if I am gay and contract HIV through a mutual relationship.....am I covered by Samaritan insurance?

No you would be covered under Ryan White

Edited May 28, 2021 by iconic

[rev ronin]

On 5/27/2021 at 9:21 PM, Cideous said:

Quick question, if I am gay Christian and contract HIV through a mutual relationship.....am I covered by Samaritan insurance?

Of course not, because it's not insurance.

As far as the rest of the question you meant to ask, the guidelines are publicly accessible and not shy about what is or is not shareable, as set by their mostly-member-elected board of directors.

[camoman1234]

On 5/27/2021 at 3:23 PM, rev ronin said:

Even worse--we do COST management.

Right now, I'm seeing insurance companies deny residential treatment for eating disorders patients, putting some very vulnerable, starved brain people in a PHP (6h/day outpatient) with a "try and fail before residential care" guidance.  Not only is it terrible for the patients themselves, PHP is for people with a certain level of coping and self-management, so throwing a single really distraught and catastrophising patient into a group setting really derails progress by the rest of the group who are supposed to be practicing their skills, challenging fear foods, and learning to take back control of their eating.  Maddening.

I agree about the crisis management but the irresponsibility is not all the patients fault. Like I said before, our food system is broke and making us sicker and sicker. We fix the food, we fix the people. That is not all that is wrong but is a huge factor as we eat every day, multiple times a day. 

[camoman1234]

On 5/27/2021 at 8:50 PM, Cideous said:

1.  This is a message board.  I will not keep my opinions to myself.

2.  Faith based medical reimbursement is NOT INSURANCE.  THEY DO NOT FALL UNDER THE ACA GUARANTEED NO MAXIMUM PAYOUT IF YOU OR YOUR FAMILY MEMBER BECOMES DREADFULLY ILL.

3.  I know exactly what I am talking about because I looked into these before.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/health/christian-health-care-insurance.html

 

I'm sure your next comment will be, "oh but it's the NYtimes!"  blah blah blah.

 

Clip from the article:  

Eight-year-old Blake Collie was at the swimming pool when he got a frightening headache. His parents rushed him to the emergency room only to learn he had a brain aneurysm. Blake spent nearly two months in the hospital. 

His family did not have traditional health insurance. “We could not afford it,” said his father, Mark Collie, a freelance photographer in Washington, N.C. 

Instead, they pay about $530 a month through a Christian health care sharing organization to pay members’ medical bills. But the group capped payments for members at $250,000, almost certainly far less than the final tally of Blake’s mounting medical bills. 

“Just trust God,” the nonprofit group, Samaritan Ministries, in Peoria, Ill., said in a statement about its coverage, and advises its members that “there is no coverage, no guarantee of payment.”

 

 

 

Read the article for the rest.  Like I said..........good luck with this NON-INSURANCE.

 

I'm glad some of you think that faith based insurance works for you, but it is a 1 way ticket to bankruptcy for any family who gets truly sick. Not just some random ER visit.

 

 

 

You can have your opinion but I can see that you have not truly done your research on this cost sharing "insurance", you don't know what you don't know. I ain't here to argue with you, just tell you facts, and stories from our family and others. It works, that is just the fact. 

[kettle]

I went to a cheap PA school, add in cost of living and other expenses, to be transparent 1/4 of my debt was from paying monthly premiums through mnsure, a single payer healthcare system essentially...... Got a few friends north of the boarder waiting 2+ years for knee replacements and hip replacements as they are not considered emergent but hard to pay bills and keep the farm when you can't climb in a tractor.

THERE IS NO PERFECT SYSTEM! 

I'll gladly take my employer private insurance these days even with the cost.....

[Cideous]

6 hours ago, camoman1234 said:

You can have your opinion but I can see that you have not truly done your research on this cost sharing "insurance", you don't know what you don't know. I ain't here to argue with you, just tell you facts, and stories from our family and others. It works, that is just the fact. 

For who?  Evangelical Christians who profess to be the sworn enemy of gay Americans?  Who EXACTLY does this cost sharing work for?  If I am a Christian who loves Jesus, spreads the gospel and lives by the 10 commandments or Jesus' two great commandments and love and choose to share my life with someone of the same sex then I am not welcome in your solution?....I am still not welcome in your answer to America's disturbingly high cost of crap insurance?  

The arrogance of this is downright shocking.  And just so you know, I grew up In this church.  I can run circles around your theological arguments as to why gay people have no place in your "cost sharing" scheme.  “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” Just not healthcare....

[rev ronin]

1 hour ago, Cideous said:

For who?  Evangelical Christians who profess to be the sworn enemy of gay Americans?  Who EXACTLY does this cost sharing work for?  If I am a Christian who loves Jesus, spreads the gospel and lives by the 10 commandments or Jesus' two great commandments and love and choose to share my life with someone of the same sex then I am not welcome in your solution?....I am still not welcome in your answer to America's disturbingly high cost of crap insurance?  

The arrogance of this is downright shocking.  And just so you know, I grew up In this church.  I can run circles around your theological arguments as to why gay people have no place in your "cost sharing" scheme.  “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” Just not healthcare....

Yeah, that's completely unhelpful to any discussion in pretty much every single statement.  Allow me to redirect it in a more helpful and factual direction:

Cost sharing has similar societal issues (meaning both benefits and problems) to homeschooling: people who care and behave in above-average ways are able to get better benefits at the same cost, or similar benefits at much reduced cost.  But these benefits are not open to and/or scalable to everyone, because not everyone is willing or able to behave in those ways.  How many dual-income households do you know who homeschool? There are certainly a few, but by far the most typical arrangement has one parent at home as the primary teacher. So those who structure their incomes otherwise are almost by default excluded.

Thus, when a motivated subset society organizes and derives better benefits than the government-run solutions, there's calls to "force" equality from those who see these benefits as unfair. There's no reason, for example, that a cost sharing arrangement couldn't be MORE liberal with preexisitng conditions... but to do so would cost more.

In other ways, the cost-sharing arrangements disproportionately attract healthy people; those who have huge medical expenses aren't going to enroll in the first place.  Rather than picking on anything politically or socially charged, let's look how they handle Type 1 diabetes.  Unless it's diagnosed when a member is enrolled, it's considered perpetually preexisting and excluded.  Harsh? Sure.  But we all know what badness DM 1 leads to eventually in most cases, and that way leads to huge expenses.  So, anyone who otherwise might be eligible and inclined to join such an arrangement will instead work to find traditional insurance.

Similar but slightly different arguments against union healthcare plans arose in the Obamacare era: unions, acting on behalf of their members, negotiated massively awesome benefit packages in lieu of higher wages.  The federal tax code encouraged that, as such insurance benefits were not taxed as employee income, while wages were. Which is fine, who really needs more than $80k a year (or whatever) when you get both CPAP and oral appliance therapy with no out of pocket, and your daughter gets braces with minimal out of pocket, and son gets great therapy for... and it goes on.  The problem with those Cadillac plans is that they incentivized medical practices to cater to them, in lieu of actually accepting medicare, let alone medicaid.

Interestingly enough, I doubt that very much of the cost saving comes from excluding specific conditions on a religious basis.  Religious people, meaning those who attend an organized religious service once a week or more, have FAR fewer healthcare costs than the general population.  The protective effect of active religious practice on health extends throughout the socioeconomic spectrum, but the benefits to minorities and lower income persons is significantly larger than that to upper middle class whites and Asians.  I mean, don't take my work for it, look at the work done (or catalogued) by Harold Koenig at Duke.

[camoman1234]

2 hours ago, Cideous said:

For who?  Evangelical Christians who profess to be the sworn enemy of gay Americans?  Who EXACTLY does this cost sharing work for?  If I am a Christian who loves Jesus, spreads the gospel and lives by the 10 commandments or Jesus' two great commandments and love and choose to share my life with someone of the same sex then I am not welcome in your solution?....I am still not welcome in your answer to America's disturbingly high cost of crap insurance?  

The arrogance of this is downright shocking.  And just so you know, I grew up In this church.  I can run circles around your theological arguments as to why gay people have no place in your "cost sharing" scheme.  “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” Just not healthcare....

Not chasing you down a hole...have a great day!