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Posted on 08/07/2012 2:30:08 PM PDT by xzins
A judge will consider whether a Christians-only health care plan should be held in contempt of court more than a year after the Kentucky Supreme Court subjected it to stricter regulations that could have meant its demise in the state.
Franklin County Circuit Judge Thomas Wingate set a hearing for Aug. 30 in the case that pits the Kentucky Department of Insurance against Medi-Share, a Florida-based cost-sharing ministry that helps pay medical bills for churchgoers.
The legal battle involves how tightly the state can regulate Medi-Share, which serves nearly 40,000 people in 49 states, including more than 700 in Kentucky.
Justices found in 2010 that Medi-Share is insurance and should be subject to the same regulations as secular health care plans, a move that could have forced the organization to serve non-Christians and to provide costly coverage of pre-existing conditions. Medi-Share says its members aren't buying insurance,
Tea party activist David Adams, "The more they look at this issue the clearer it will become to Kentucky's two million active Christians that their rights to save money on one of their biggest bills is being unconstitutionally inhibited by their state government," Adams said.
Medi-Share members affirm a statement of Christian beliefs and pledge to follow a code that includes no tobacco or illegal drugs, no sex outside of marriage, and no abuse of alcohol or legal medications. Every month, members pay a fixed "share" to cover the medical expenses of members in need. The cost usually is less than private insurance.
The organization says it helps Christians pay medical bills based on a Bible verse that urges people to "carry each other's burdens.".
(Excerpt) Read more at money.msn.com ...
right after ramadan? :>)
Freedom of association in jeopardy too. Let’s just keep putting up with it though.
We had an earlier version where we sent our monthly payment to another member with medical bills. Different person each month for 11 months. 12th month went to the office to pay overhead.
My wife had a botched gall-bladder operation, ended up with $55,000 in medical bills. They assigned her bills to Singles, whose monthly rate was $50 back then. 6 weeks later we had received 1,100 checks from Singles, each for $50. Paid the entire bill, no problems.
Naturally, some tin-pot regulatory dictator will mess up anything that’s working and they don’t control.
I have no problem with any health care plan for muslims, Jews, Catholics, Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus or Wiccans only. Why should any city, county, state or federal government give a damn? It’s none of their business...........
Just curious, why was it assigned to singles?
Yeah, but I kind of see the other side of this.
This is insurance. Except they may not have the same legal obligation to cover your bills as real insurance normally does.
And while Medi-Share has been around for a while and seems to be a good company, whose to say that fly by night operations won’t start emulating them.
Insurance companies that would promise the moon but never pay is why they started regulating insurance in the first place.
If you allow companies to say, I’m not real insurance because I don’t collect all the premiums directly, then how do you prevent a return to all the problems that we regulated insurance for in the first place?
Now I’m not saying all insurance regulations are in the people’s interests. Clearly insurance companies use regulations to their interests too. But it sure is nice to be able to call an insurance commissioner when a large insurance is trying to welch on a promise, instead of having to hire a lawyer each time.
Group plan. What’s the problem? Oh, it involves Christians. Never mind. /s
I’m getting ready to switch to MediShare and get off our rip-off Blue Cross policy. I hope this isn’t, somehow, the beginning of the end for MediShare, but I’ve wondered how the progs could let something like this continue in their crackdown on all individual freedoms.
I’m not surprised. Since the whole point of expanding gov’t is to destroy Christianity, there was no way they’d allow Christians to avoid the effects of Obamacare.
I considered the lead-in to be poorly written before the quote. The quote is what happened, so his filing was not against but on behalf of.
Tea party activist David Adams, who has filed complaints with the Department of Insurance about Medi-Share and similar ministries,...
Tea party activist David Adams, "The more they look at this issue the clearer it will become to Kentucky's two million active Christians that their rights to save money on one of their biggest bills is being unconstitutionally inhibited by their state government,"
So, did the reporter, here, totally botch the story, or is this Adams guy playing both ends against the middle??
Is this guy trying to help MediShare and its participants, or to wipe it from the Earth?
My IFF is confused, which always makes my trigger finger itchy.
I’d say the first section is poorly written and that the quote, since it is what the guy is actually saying, is the direction of his true position.
If the complaints are filed “about” medi-share, that doesn’t mean they aren’t complaints against the dept of insurance. Their topic is medi-share, so they are “about”.
In other words, poorly written.
Maybe he filed complaints about how the state was TREATING medi-share, not complaints ABOUT how medi-share was operating.
It’s like food coops. After a while the grocers realize business is going that direction, so they start complaining. The difference is that grocers don’t have their own government agency to crack down on their competition.
As with all combined efforts, someone will occasionally gum up the works and they’ll have to make rules to cover that.
And of course it’s Constitutional and voluntary. Can’t have that.
This is how the Amish community handles their health care costs.
That is an amazing story, BN. Did they need confirmation of the surgery and the bills from the hospital? How did that work?
That’s the argument for every nanny state regulation, that people without them won’t be able to look out for themselves.
See #5 above for an example of this.
My guess is that the big problem with it is the government’s cut.
If people send their share of the expense directly to the need, then we can guess an insurance company would have overhead to cover that would have made them charge policy holders enough to pay for the medical care, for their buildings, their agents, their secretaries, their administrators, etc.
Each of those employed people would be paying income tax, and the business itself would be paying taxes.
The way this was done bypassed an awful lot of taxes, and that’s got to have government blokes getting really nervous.
You could just as well claim that of every single government function including national defense. But the truth is that the absence of government results in Somalia.
I don't want to have to hire a lawyer or get a law degree to buy insurance. The history of abuses by insurance companies is long and at least some regulation of insurance companies is very warranted.
All things in moderation. I don't want big government, but I definitely want national defense and insurance regulation among other things.
KY can do what it wants. It's their right.
KY can do what it wants. It's their right.
What if they change their mind and don't want insurance regulation? Insurance regulation and national defense don't belong in the same sentence. Kind of an insult to our men and women in uniform, don't you think?
And what's with the Somalia strawman? Pure DU. The left always says that if we cut the size of the federal government it's automatically Somalia. Pure Moveon.org talking points.
That's up to KY. I live in TN.
"Insurance regulation and national defense don't belong in the same sentence. Kind of an insult to our men and women in uniform, don't you think? "
Only if you insist on reading it wrong. National defense is an absolute government necessity. Very few people would argue that we don't need it. It's there to justify that some government functions are good.
It's also there because as the statement clearly says, it's one thing that I want from government. Insurance regulation is another thing that I want from government. If you want to read anything into it more than that those are two things I want "among others" from government, then that's your problem, not mine.
I didn't in any way equate the two. That's all in your mind.
You are exactly right. This is about the big insurance companies using government to force people to purchase their product. Our family was with a wonderful group that was forced out of Texas, this was maybe 15 or more years ago.
I am watching this too. Am interested in switching to one of the three companies available.
We received the last group of bills in January of 199? and sent those in. They then published our need in the February Newsletter.
I had opened a checking account just for these expenses at a local bank, which had given me a free account when they learned the purpose.
By the end of March, I had received & deposited 1,100 individual checks, and paid off all our medical bills. God is good, and His people are, too!
BTW, when my wife was admitted to the Emory University hospital they asked for our insurance carrier. I told them about this Christian group and they said, “Oh, that’s not Insurance. We’ll just put you in as “Doctor’s Fund”.
I told them, “No, this thing works!”
I later learned that “Doctor’s Fund” was really “Doctors Fund for the Indigent”. Kind and gracious folks at Emory, even though we did not need their “Doctor’s Fund”!
“Just curious, why was it assigned to singles?”
I’m guessing it was because the amount, $55,000 was an even multiple of the $50/Month fee for singles. It could have worked just as well for Couples at $100/Month, but not for Families at $150/Month.
dude, yer off yer meds...Defense of the Republic is one of a very few actual fed powers supposedly delegated by the citizenry, NOT a means to justify government...
Insurance regulation is another thing that I want from government.
thats sweet...now make yer list for uncle santa, and we can combine that with a few hundred million other wants from around the nation, and voila, FEDfrankenzilla is alive and kickin...
at some point, crying to gubmint about everything has to stop...but unfortunately, the system has been layered for you to *need* them more than FReedom...
Some sort of national defense is necessary. But this thing we call national defense is a huge make works(middle class welfare) wasteful and self destructive program. It is also a huge affirmative action program that discriminates based on race and sex while outlawing it for others,
The government is not designed to do complicated things in a efficient fashion, nor even manage them,
Why we waste trillions (and waste lives) in countries where people hate us just to abandon them anyway is beyond comprehension.
China has a DIFFERENT foreign policy, it's called make $$$ for China policy then loan it to USA to waste. You see China bogging them-self down in endless fruitless wars? No, they are busy building themselves up to challenge us.
“I don’t want to have to hire a lawyer or get a law degree to buy insurance.”
Why not? Are you not capable of it? Do you hire a lawyer to do other things for you?
Government should only do the things that private individuals can’t do, not the things that they can do but don’t “want” to do. Common defense is something individuals can’t do.
The mess we are in is precisely because of thinking like your, everyone picks the thing they don’t want to do and expects the government to do it. Trouble is everyone’s idea of that thing is different, pretty soon we have a nanny state that doing everything for everyone.
And backing Hillary Romney all the way.
Doesn’t Medi-Share lose either way? If it successfully argues that it ISN’T insurance it is superseded by the ObamaCare insurance mandate. Medi-Share participants would have to buy medical insurance in addition to Medi-Share.
Any IRS issues? Did they try to claim those checks as you receiving “income”?
No, it was counted as “insurance”, IIRC.
I was once in a similar program, not Medi-
share.
Here’s the thing: Obamacare would decimate such plans no matter whether the plan argued it was insurance or argued it wasn’t.
Because there’s more than just a requirement to buy insurance. The feds actually rule the details of every move everybody makes, from the insurance company plans to the lowliest individual consumer.
Every move has to be pre-approved by the HHS. What is covered, how much to charge, etc. These type plans follow their own internal rules. Those who sign on to them are voluntarily agreeing with those rules. And can voluntarily leave if they later decide to.
None of that is possibe under Obamacare.
WHAT to call it...insurance or not insurance, won’t matter.
There are places where Government works well, this is one of them. Although even this is not immune to corruption if the citizenry elect people of poor character.
Apply your argument to building codes. Nobody wants the city or town telling them what they can and can't do on their property. Yet practically every American community votes to have building codes and enforcement. Why? Because it protects everyone's property values to have communities where all the buildings are build to a certain safety standard.
Every state, all 50 of them, have freely chosen to regulate insurance. There is no federal incentive that I’m aware of with regard to insurance. Yet every state of their own free will chooses to do so.
So it’s your opinion vs the collective wisdom of 50 individual free states.
So I think I’m done discussing whether insurance should be regulated. The only thing left is whether Med-share is insurance. And I’m pretty sure it is. We’ll soon see what the KY judge thinks.
See post 50.
Somalia is what you get when government does nothing. Be careful what you wish for.
i wish for FReedom, from you as well as all levels of gubmint, who are necessarily doing your bidding, because you vote to delegate your responsibilities to the rest of the citizenry...
the reason you *need* insurance or a lawyer for contracts is rooted in government creep from previous generations who believed that their pet issue was more important than my FReedom...
is somalia supposed to scare me ??? I dont FEAR FReedom, it is a bit more risky than statist central planning, up until the point where everybody elses pet issue makes me a criminal anyways...
There is a balance in between the anarchy of no government and statist central planning that is preferable to either. Not all government is bad. There's a reason all of the colonies started a state government. There's a reason all of our founding father's formed the constitution and set up a federal government. And there's a reason that they put checks and balances and limits on the Federal government.
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