Two years
ago my husband made a career change. It
was going to be outrageously expensive for us to get health insurance through
his current work, so we opted to buy private insurance with a high
deductible. We searched and searched for
two months to find something reasonable and settled on a plan with a 10,000
deductible for around $400 a month for just myself and two kids. My husband was covered through his work. Prior to this experience, we'd been blessed
with incredible health coverage and paid very little out of pocket. We
quickly realized how foolish this high deductible plan was. For one, if we had a true emergency, we'd be
paying a heck of a lot of money out of our pockets and two it did not cover
maternity. We began to pray asking the
Lord to lead us to the right insurance plan.
Ecclesiastes 3 reminded me that there is a time to search and a time to cease
from searching. It was time to stop and
simply pray. In the next month, the Lord
brought about a conversation with some friends about maternity coverage, the
high cost of insurance, etc. This friend
told me about Samaritan Ministries, a biblical non-insurance approach to health
care needs. The cost for our whole
family would only be $355 no matter how many children we had. Could this be true? They covered maternity too! We were ecstatic and skeptical because it
seemed too good to be true. My husband
and I sat down to make our list of questions.
After compiling the list of questions, we set out to have our friends as
well as Samaritan Ministries answer them.
We found that if we had a need fitting the guidelines, we would pay $300
and the rest would be paid by fellow believers.
We signed up November of 2011.
January 2012 we found out we were expecting and therefore had our first
"need." Samaritans covered our
entire pregnancy and childbirth experience 100%. We received letters and checks from other
Samaritan members to cover all our bills.
I cannot tell you what a different experience this was having used
traditional healthcare in the past. I
kept every letter we received as many of the prayers and notes were so rich and
packed with scripture praying for our daughter. Below is a link if you are interested in checking it out.
This intrigues me and scares me all at the same time! We are getting hospital bills now for the birth of Mary Thames. Since she was in the NICU for five days, you can imagine how high they are. We have great insurance (state benefits), but will still be out of pocket 75,000-10,000. Insurance is great, but it is also very expensive!
ReplyDeleteKaren, First of all Mary Thames is adorable! I love seeing her pics on facebook. Bills concerning healthcare can be so outrageous! Gosh...that is a lot that you will have to pay out of pocket with good insurance. We experienced the high cost of healthcare with our second son when he became sick in the womb. At that time, we had BCBS. Thankful for good doctors, but do not like receiving the bills in the mail.
ReplyDeleteI agree! We have United Healthcare. In some ways, they are amazing. I have Hereditary Angioedema. It requires me to give myself an IV of meds every three days from home. The meds are hugely expensive. Each dose is $4,000 and we dose every three days. United Healthcare pays 100%. No copay, no deductible for this. It is such an amazing gift. There is no way we could afford this much needed treatment if not for them. With that said, we will be paying for MT's birth until she graduates :) And thank you for the compliment. We can't wait for y'all to meet her. She is a wonderful baby.
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