Onward, Christian Health Care?

[cbayer]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/01/opinion/sunday/onward-christian-health-care.html?_r=0

By MOLLY WORTHEN
JAN. 31, 2015


Gracia Lam

WHEN Theresa Bixby, 63, learned that she had breast cancer four years ago, she reacted as many Americans do. “One of my first thoughts was, ‘will they pay?’ ” she said. But she wasn’t talking about a conventional insurance plan. She lost hers when she left her full-time position for part-time work at her church in Greenville, S.C. She was worried about the program that she had joined six months earlier: Christian Healthcare Ministries.

Christian Healthcare Ministries is not an insurance company. It is a nonprofit “health care sharing ministry” based in Barberton, Ohio. The cost of membership is far lower than the rates of traditional insurance policies — $45 a month for the cheapest plan — but the ministry makes no guarantees of payment. Members send their monthly “gift” to an escrow account, which disburses payments for eligible medical bills, excluding costs like routine physicals, continuing treatment for pre-existing conditions or procedures that members have voted to exclude, like care for pregnancies outside wedlock.

Each time Ms. Bixby visited her hospital for tests or chemotherapy, she explained that she was a self-pay patient and a member of a cost-sharing ministry. Sometimes the receptionist nodded; sometimes she got a blank stare. The hospital never denied her treatment, but “I was getting a two-inch stack of bills every month, and threats that they would take me to collections,” she told me.

Christian Healthcare Ministries assigned her case to a “member advocate,” who negotiated discounts on her fees. These counted toward Ms. Bixby’s $5,000 deductible, so she paid out of pocket only for office visits. In the end, the ministry persuaded the hospital to lop $220,900 off a bill of $301,540 and reimbursed or paid directly the remaining $80,640.

more at link

[on point]

1. All that back n forth negotiations is expensive inefficiencies. Single payer please

Perfect example of what is wrong in health. Uncertainty upfront, over charge in the middle, expensive claims adjustment, and final way to expensive expensive bill. Perfect case for single payer and socialized medicine. Thanks

[cbayer]

3. I am 100% for single payer, as well as single provider,

but I think this is a very interesting system they have going here.

[Htom Sirveaux]

2. Some conservative Christians out there justify opposing

government aid to the poor in part because they think that government will put church-based charities out of a job. Convenient how these healthcare ministries have only become prominent now that they are a way of avoiding payment for "immorality". Why didn't they solve the healthcare crisis in the first place?

It's not just about helping people (who cares who gets the credit as long as people get helped?) it's about retaining control of "our way of life". This is the same idea that led conservative Christians to become political in the first place, when the IRS yanked Bob Jones University's tax exemption because the university still practiced segregation (according to evangelical historian Randall Balmer).

[cbayer]

4. I have never heard the position that conservative christians oppose

government aid to the poor because they think the government will put church-based charities out of a job. Where did you get that?

Actually, these have apparently been around a long time, though I was unfamiliar with them. They are growing in response to the ACA, as the story points out. While they clearly present an ideology that is hard to stomach, its' an interesting way of doing things.

[Htom Sirveaux]

5. A couple of examples:

Ross Douthat arguing the case in the NY Times:

But there are trade-offs as well, which liberal communitarians don’t always like to acknowledge. When government expands, it’s often at the expense of alternative expressions of community, alternative groups that seek to serve the common good. Unlike most communal organizations, the government has coercive power — the power to regulate, to mandate and to tax. These advantages make it all too easy for the state to gradually crowd out its rivals. The more things we “do together” as a government, in many cases, the fewer things we’re allowed to do together in other spheres.

Sometimes this crowding out happens gradually, subtly, indirectly. Every tax dollar the government takes is a dollar that can’t go to charities and churches. Every program the government runs, from education to health care to the welfare office, can easily become a kind of taxpayer-backed monopoly.

But sometimes the state goes further. Not content with crowding out alternative forms of common effort, it presents its rivals an impossible choice: Play by our rules, even if it means violating the moral ideals that inspired your efforts in the first place, or get out of the community-building business entirely.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/douthat-government-and-its-rivals.html?_r=1&ref=rossdouthat

and Franklin Graham agrees (via FireDogLake):

“A hundred years ago the social safety net in the country was provided by the church,” the Rev. Franklin Graham told Christiane Amanpour. “If you didn’t have a job, you’d go to your local church and ask the pastor if he knew somebody that could hire him. If you were hungry, you went to the local church and told them, ‘I can’t feed my family.’ And the church would help you. And that’s not being done.”

Graham’s comments come as people across the country debate the degree to which the government should manage social programs including Medicare, social security and health care.

“The government took that,” Graham said. “They had more money to give and more programs to give and pretty soon the churches just backed off.”

http://firedoglake.com/2011/04/26/franklin-grahams-lament-government-poverty-programs-take-money-away-from-churches/

Granted that these examples are 3-4 years old, but the view is out there.

[cbayer]

6. I appreciate that but it doesn't really jive with what I have seen.

I have seen religious groups filling the gaps and providing the safety net where the government has failed to do so.

I do see the argument that that lament the loss of control when the government does step up to the plate, but that's just too bad.

Ross Douthat and Franklin Graham most definitely represent a subgroup within the religious community, but their views seem primarily libertarian and they are going to resist government intervention no matter what the subject.

[Htom Sirveaux]

7. I'm not saying it's an ultra-popular view (so I prefaced my remarks with "some" rather than "many").

I think that religious charity is an excellent thing as a general rule, when it isn't like this.

[cbayer]

8. Ugh, Charles Colson.

I appreciate your ability to distinguish the wheat from the chaff.