By Gary North
The Tea Party Economist
February 4, 2015
My wife is a member of Christian Health Care Ministries. At age 64, she pays $1,000 a year. What are you paying? You are probably younger, yet you pay more.
You are forced to do this by ObamaCare. My wife is exempt from ObamaCare. Maybe you can be, too.
If you are a Christian, you can cut your health insurance costs by half — maybe more. You can stay out of ObamaCare’s clutches. It’s all legal. These programs got onto the “need not comply” list in 2010. It’s the law. It’s a done deal. The Republicans in Congress are not about to put their constituents back into the “skin them for other people’s health care” pot. The horses are out of Obama’s barn.
This has the Left in a tizzy fit. The thought of it! Bible-believing Christians get a free pass. The atheists must pay full scale. But ObamaCare is a wealth redistribution scheme, as voters know now. So, atheists pay for ObamaCare’s welfare clients, too. Christians don’t pay this if they don’t want to.
My wife does not want to.
Tough providence, atheists! You got Obama. Then he got you. You deserve each other. Warm fuzzies to you all.
Read a cry of Leftist moral outrage in The New York Times. The author is an untenured assistant professor on the public payroll at the University of North Carolina. If she gets tenure, she will be in fat city for the rest of her career. But if she doesn’t, she faces this prospect: teaching at a community college as an untenured adjunct instructor who makes $20/hour, with no health insurance or retirement program, by teaching 150 mediocre (or worse) students each term. You can read about this here. Grim.
She needs published articles to get tenure. She needs them in respected journals — not The Journal of Comparative Obscurity. Maybe she hopes that an op-ed piece in The New York Times will count. This assumes that her department’s tenure evaluation committee has adopted this principle: “screeds = scholarship.” She writes this:
The four main cost-sharing ministries in the United States have about 340,000 members. Regulators in several states have raised concerns that these ministries offer the illusion of insurance while sidestepping the Affordable Care Act’s baseline standards of coverage and skirting requirements that apply to conventional insurance companies, like minimum cash reserves. Nonetheless, membership in the ministries has been growing, particularly since the act granted them an exemption as one of the only ways to avoid the law’s mandate to buy insurance without paying a fine.
But the debate over consumer protections may disguise a more interesting question: Could this model scale up? These ministries seem to achieve a remarkable level of member satisfaction, even if they sometimes must portion out reimbursements when the bills outstrip monthly contributions.
The ministries’ appeal lies partly in their low fees, but also in their ideological boundaries. “This isn’t something that’s for everyone,” said Tony Meggs, the C.E.O. of the Florida-based Christian Care Ministry, which runs a health care sharing program called Medi-Share.
Read the full article