Health-Care Sharing Organizations, Avoiding the ACA

The Washington Post has a story on the various health-care financing options outside the Affordable Care Act that have grown since the Act was passed, with signups from people opposed to the law's  requirements. These include the faith-based "healthcare sharing ministries" that have an explicit (limited) exemption from the Act.

[Sarah] Tucker dropped the private health plan she had carried for more than a decade and joined Christian Healthcare Ministries, a faith-based nonprofit in which members pool their money to pay for one another’s medical needs — and promise to adhere to biblical values, such as attending church and abstaining from sex outside marriage....

Christian Healthcare Ministries ... has existed since the 1980s, but membership has surged — growing by 60 percent to more than 80,000 members — since the health-care law was passed. The most popular plan costs $150 a month per person and covers medical bills up to $125,000 for any single illness or incident. People with higher bills are covered if they belong to a special program in which members split the cost. This “brother’s keeper” program typically costs less than $100 a year, according to the group....

As someone who studies both religious liberty and religious social ethics, I'm interested in ways in which religious objectors to legal requirements like the ACA are forming, or might form, alternative institutions and practices that avoid the regulations. For devotees of a Stanley Hauerwas-type perspective on Christian ethics, this whole process might be salutary: Christians resisting the norms of the general secular culture, meeting more of the needs of each other and others through highly distinctive church-related practices and organizations, and thereby moving further toward seeing the church as an "alternative polis." There are, of course, major challenges involved in making that move:

"These ministries operate on a very high degree of trust,” said Timothy S. Jost, a Washington and Lee University law professor and consumer advocate. “It’s really important that people really believe in this and are committed to this. If you have a bunch of people sign up who are doing this only to [avoid the health-care law], the whole thing can collapse.”