John Oliver on healthcare ministries: ‘They are not health insurance’ | Late night TV tour

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In Last Week Tonight, John Oliver delves into American health insurance — more specifically, health care engagement ministries, organizations in which members share health care costs that are often misleadingly described as health insurance, centered around shared religious dogma, and ready to abuse the use.

“The most important thing to know about healthcare sharing ministries is not only that they can be cheaper than health insurance, which they can do,” Oliver explained. It’s not health insurance either. Generally, they are non-profit organizations where people who share religious beliefs, usually Christianity, agree to help cover each other’s medical bills.”

Healthcare engagement ministries have been around for decades, usually for isolated communities such as the Mennonites or the Amish. But its popularity exploded after 2010, when the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, included ministries as an exemption from the law’s mandated insurance mandate. Some healthcare engagement ministries, such as Liberty Healthshare, are advertising specifically to conservative audiences who hate the law, with ads on right-wing fringe networks and at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

At their best, health care engagement ministries can offer warm stories of generosity and community care. “It looks like people looking for each other are actually better than our current system, which is: Illness, you have insurance refusal coverage, then hopefully Debra Messing will retweet your GoFundMe,” Oliver quipped. “And he feels that sending $500 a month to a needy stranger is more personal than sending $500 a month to محتاج [insurance] A company that looks like someone made up a word after getting the hand of a prolific Scrabble,” like massive service providers Aetna, Cigna, or Humana.

Oliver continued, there are “significant flaws” to health care engagement ministries, ranging from “disturbing to incompetent.”

After the Obamacare exemptions, the number of people who rely on healthcare sharing ministries to pay for treatment has risen from 200,000 members to more than 1 million today. “And while the HCSM will insist that they make it very clear that they are not health insurance, many of them seem to be doing their best to make themselves as like insurance as possible.”

Because ministries do not offer physical insurance, they do not have to comply with government regulations and can therefore refuse to cover pre-existing conditions or essential services such as substance abuse treatment or mental health care.

More importantly, Oliver explained, they can decline coverage based on ethics criteria, “which means you can be denied coverage for basically anything.” Many HCSMs will not pay for health care for smoking complications and will reject LGBTQ members. Liberty Healthshare’s guidelines state that the applicant “must comply with … a Christian lifestyle.”

As for ensuring that bills are actually paid, Oliver referred to a video of Liberty CEO Dale Bellis titled “Will My Bills Be Paid?” Where he reassures: “It’s not based on a written contract where we can sue each other if someone doesn’t send their share amount; it’s really a written contract in our hearts.”

“Oh, well, it’s a contract written in your hearts,” Oliver said emphatically. Figuratively, of course, because it’s not a literal contract. Regarding his claim there that Liberty has been successful in sharing 100% of medical bills for “every eligible need,” since, as we’ve discussed, they can consider any need ineligible for any reason, that statement Basically meaningless, like the heart.

“And on top of all this, there is the practical issue of how exactly you will pay for your care as a member,” he continued, especially since members rely on HCSMs for compensation after they have paid the cost up front. “If you’ve ever been waited on by your friends to Venmo, after you’ve paid for dinner, you know the checkout process can go very wrong,” Oliver said.

Oliver later added, “Look, at scale, we have to do more in this country to reduce the cost of health care,” and though he was advocating a single payer system, “that’s obviously not going to happen any time soon. Meanwhile, I get a plea for low-cost health insurance. The problem is that it’s not – it’s not insurance at all. And states need to at the very least pass laws that ensure people know what they’re up to with HCSM and force them to allocate money correctly” .

But some states are going in the opposite direction, such as Florida, which in 2018 relaxed its restrictions on HCSM from requiring participants to be members of the same religion to requiring them to “a common set of moral or religious beliefs.”

“This could be basically anything,” Oliver said. “At this point, the denial of entry is so low that anyone can become HCSM. And my reason for knowing that is,” he added, referring to himself, “that’s what anyone did.”

Three months ago, he explained, Last Week Tonight launched its own church, “Our Lady of Perpetual Health,” part of the fake “Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption,” which was founded in 2015 as a satire for churches’ tax breaks. The Florida-based Jokes Church now has its own health care engagement ministry, Johnnycare, which was “quite easy” to set up.

However, Oliver offered the ministry to viewers, with an offer to go to www.freedomfromhealthcare.org and “see if you qualify to send us money and get nothing in return”.

“As close to nothing we can get rid of,” former SNL cast member Rachel Drach said as fake pastor Wanda Jo.

“And to be clear, we shouldn’t be able to get away with any of this,” Oliver added.

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