Health care is something that everyone needs and sometimes urgently. Because the health industry in the US is mostly private, this leaves it wide open for unscrupulous people to take advantage of this need for their own profit. Add to that the wide leeway that the US gives to religious organizations and it should not come as a surprise that groups acting under the umbrella of religion are making money claiming to support for people’s health care needs without actually doing so.
John Oliver looks at one such program that goes by the name of Health Care Sharing Ministries and shows how easy it is to claim that an entity is a religious organization and take advantage of all the loopholes.
Not long ago, I left a company when they switched to a (secular, I think) version of this no-health-insurance. The owner of the company had a wife with a fatal illness, and the insurance plan we switched to was a “pool”, where we all had money deducted from our paychecks but any medical claims were made were evaluated and they paid out whatever they felt like. If the wife had a run of really high medical bills, none of us got any sort of care or prescriptions covered because the pool all went to her bills.
There was absolutely no way to tell claim to claim what might get paid and what not…but we all could guarantee it wasn’t much.