Health care cost sharing ministries left some members to pay high childbirth bills

In response to an inquiry about Seiter’s and Walborn’s cases, Liberty said it is transparent about its guidelines, which members agree to when they sign up.

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“We regret that the processing of these members’ bills was delayed, but in an organization that receives hundreds of thousands of bills annually, processing errors may occur despite our best efforts,” said Timothy Bryan, the group’s vice president of marketing and communications.

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“We note these situations occurred over five years ago and Liberty has significantly improved its processes over this time period,” he added.

Liberty agreed to a settlement with the Ohio attorney general in 2021 that required it to replace its top leadership, but it did not admit wrongdoing. A group of former Liberty members also sued the ministry that year, alleging that the organization had refused to pay covered medical procedures while reaping “massive profits.” Liberty said in court filings that the Ohio settlement has remedied those plaintiffs’ claims. The suit is ongoing.

Warnings and pushback

Weldon, Trump’s pick to lead the CDC, has praised health care sharing ministries for giving consumers more options and flexibility. But he told NBC News that while president of the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries, he worried that bad actors could cast a negative light on the model.

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“I tried to promote getting all of those ministries together to develop rigorous self-policing standards,” he said, adding: “They all sort of marched to their own drummer, and I repeatedly reminded them that if they didn’t really clean their act up, that they were going to be regulated by 50 different [state] governments.”

Indeed, some state officials and other groups have tried to limit the ministries’ reach.

The American Hospital Association sent a warning about the ministries to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last year. More than a dozen state insurance departments have issued consumer alerts about the ministries. And over the last five years, some state regulators and attorneys general have taken a range of legal actions against a few health care sharing ministries, accusing them of misrepresenting their plans.

On the federal level, Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., reintroduced a bill last year that would require health care sharing ministries to submit annual financial disclosures to the IRS and other regulators, but the bill has stalled in committee.