Nov
16
Posted on 11-16-2007 at 02:15pm
God Is My Insurance Pilot
Filed Under (Work & Money, Health, Religion & Spirituality) by Katherine Coble on 11-16-2007

Chris Wage has a story up linking to Samaritan Ministries, a Christian Healthcare Fund.

How will I pay my bills when I have a need? You explain to your care providers (doctors, hospitals, etc.) that you do not have insurance and that you are a self-pay patient. The providers send their bills directly to you. You organize the bills, complete a Need Processing Form, and submit them to Samaritan Ministries. We will publish your need in the newsletter, and the members assigned to your need will be asked to send their monthly shares directly to you through the mail. You can use the money you receive in paying your bills.

I pretty much said my piece about it in the comments over there. Short version: we have relatives who do this and it doesn’t work that well. Bill Hobbs has a good idea in response.

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Comments

Jay on 16 November, 2007 at 3:57 pm #

Didn’t they try that at Twentieth Century Motor Company?


Magniloquence on 16 November, 2007 at 5:13 pm #

That reminds me of a fascinating book I read for my Economic Sociology class: Morals & Markets; The Development of Life Insurance in the United States (Viviana Zelizer. 1983) It detailed, among other things, the many kinds of life insurance that didn’t catch on as well (or were stamped out by nervous competitors).

The biggest problem I see with this particular model is that despite bypassing HMOs and the usual offending beuracracy, there is no attendant reduction in complexity. You still have to send a cloud of paperwork off into the aether and hope someone competent will pick it up and run with it.

And, of course, you still have to get your paperwork processed by the people recieving your money. If you go to the Emergency Room for something, you can wind up with fees from the hospital itself, the individual doctors who treated you, the technicians who ran the tests (and their unit/s, if you used a lot of their resources), not to mention pharmacy fees, ambulance fees, and depending on where you are and how long you convalesce, fees for things such as TV and computer use. That’s all still happening, and if you don’t have an HMO to go through (which at least has people who, in theory, have the correct phone numbers and contacts to talk to these people), you have to track down each and every one yourself and make sure that a) they’ll take your method of payment, b) they are accurately charging you for what happened, and c) that they got your money, correctly applied it to your bill, and that they won’t turn around and re-charge you for it afterward.

For the majority of cases (a small majority, but I do believe it’s still a numerical majority), that’s more complex than anything you have to do with an HMO. Even if they get something wrong, you can yell at one entity (the HMO) to get it right. It’s not perfect, and it’s got gaping holes giving the one in our ozone a run for its money, but at the relatively low level of everyday interactions, it’s still simpler than this plan seems to be.