Atheists and Blue State Legislators Target Health Care Sharing Ministries in Attack on Religious Freedom
Under the shadowy figures running the Biden administration, the FBI targeted Christians. The FBI actually used the “hate map” generated by the infamous anti-American Southern Poverty Law Center. Unfortunately, the war on Christians didn’t end with the last election. There are other forces in the public square who reject the God-given rights to free speech and free exercise of religion recognized by the First Amendment and who are targeting Christians.
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Specifically, those hostile to faith have set their sights on an even more vulnerable minority than traditional Catholics, or Christian cake-bakers in Colorado: members of Health Care Sharing Ministries. There are only about a million members of Health Care Sharing Ministries in the United States. Some smaller states are home to only a few hundred. Yet, a rising handful of blue state legislators, in league with obnoxious, atheist media figures like John Oliver and national atheist associations, are taking aim at these ministries (more on this below). Why is there an orchestrated effort to squelch the First Amendment rights of these groups?
The problem seems to boil down to this: Health Care Sharing Ministries are not health insurance. Health Care Sharing Ministries are 501(C)3 nonprofit charities. They convene communities of like-minded religious believers and facilitate the sharing of medical bills between them, praying for one another and supporting each other in their health journeys.
Each member of a Health Care Sharing Ministry agrees to the ministry statement of shared religious beliefs. Members also agree to the sharing guidelines and, for most ministries, commit to living a healthy lifestyle. Members in these ministries share more than a billion dollars each year in medical expenses with each other, including expensive bills for chemotherapy and heart bypasses, as well as more routine procedures.
Unlike health insurance, our members do not make a contractual commitment to pay a company that uses actuarial analysis to determine costs based on risk and profit margins for the insurance company and its Wall Street investors. Our members are morally but not legally obligated to one another.
Thirty-four states recognize that Health Care Sharing Ministries are not insurance in their state law, and the Affordable Care Act exempts the ministry members from that law’s federal insurance mandates. That doesn’t mean that the ministries are free to do whatever they wish with impunity. In every state, charitable organizations like the ministries are regulated by the Attorney General and the state and federal tax authorities, overseeing nonprofits. Ministries, like every entity, aren’t allowed to cheat, defraud or steal from the public.
Nonetheless, for some state legislators, the mere existence of Christians who operate outside the insurance system is an affront. This is particularly true in states where mandates on health insurance are a tool of the totalitarian left to impose on all citizens their unholy sacraments of abortion and gender mutilations. Constitutionally protected escape hatches from these conscience violations, like membership in Health Care Sharing Ministries, are a threat to this master plan.
So far, these efforts have not yet succeeded except in one state: Colorado, where a three-year-old law requires health care sharing ministries — religious membership organizations — to disclose their inner workings, contractors, agreements with doctors and hospitals, recruitment and evangelization materials, and financials to the state insurance bureaucrats or else pay crushing fines that would close their doors. This is akin to demanding that churches report how they spend the money in their collection basket, how much their pastor makes, who their HVAC vendor is, who their elders and bible study leaders are, and turn over weekly sermons for state scrutiny.
It gets worse. After taking all this information, the law then requires the bureaucrats to summarize the information in their own hostile words, and report as much of it as possible to the public — essentially requiring the ministries to participate in state sponsored speech whereby the government “warns” the public about how these ministries are religious and don’t do non-religious things like cutting the breasts off little girls, serving as a sort of pagan “buyer beware” notice.
When a group of ministries sued Colorado for violating its First Amendment rights, evidence surfaced during discovery that the state was far from a neutral actor merely trying to “protect consumers,” or just applying religiously neutral law to all sharing organizations. The truth is that the state even admits that the vast majority of ministries and members of sharing organizations are religious, not secular. Further, email traffic between bureaucrats distinguishes between the Christian ministries that were the real target of the law and the secular “good guys” that the state government arbitrarily chose to exempt from the law’s reporting requirements.
A particularly egregious example of bias that emerged in discovery was, as the ministries’ legal brief describes, the state’s collusion with none other than “John Oliver — best known for creating a fake church and mocking religion — to ridicule health care sharing ministries as ‘hypocritical organizations’ that ‘exploit morality clauses to deny coverage to queer people, the obese or even people who smoke or drink.’” This evidence together yields more than a “slight suspicion” that stem[s] from animosity to religion or distrust of its practices.”
Colorado, lest we forget, is the state that has infamously persecuted the same Christian baker all the way up to the Supreme Court, twice. So, it’s unclear how the ministries will fare in the lower courts. In the meantime, national atheist groups have pounced on the Colorado law as a model and are aggressively pushing atheist or atheist-adjacent legislators in other states to introduce carbon copy legislation — or worse. Indeed, the Oregon version of the bill includes the state fingerprinting ministry leaders and all members in addition to the onerous reporting requirements. A recent symposium called “Keeping Track of Health Care Sharing Ministries” was hosted by the American Humanist Association, the Center for Freethought Equality and the Association of Secular Elected Officials and featured a three-hour hate-a-thon against the ministries and celebratory platforming of the atheist legislators orchestrating persecution of them, blue state by blue state.
During the symposium, a Minnesota legislator admitted his bill was drafted in an attempt to “make it seem like it’s not targeting religion.”
The anti-First Amendment fervor has gone so far that one state official in Vermont actually admitted at a committee hearing on the Colorado-style bill, “[W]ell, I’d actually just like to ban them (Health Care Sharing Ministries) if we could.” She had to be reminded by the Committee chair that the groups are actually religious, which would make an outright ban awkward.
Health Care Sharing Ministries are not insurance and must not be subjected to insurance regulations, not just because of immoral abortion mandates plaguing insurance plans, but also because our programs are simply not insurance. Pretending these legislative initiatives are about consumer protection from bad actors pretending to be health care sharing ministries is belied by the fact that the reporting bills wouldn’t stop any bad actors. Indeed, bad actors would simply not file the required report or would lie in their reports. The fact is that states already have the tools they need to shut down organizations that lie, cheat or steal from the public. Dozens of states actually did so a few years ago when a for-profit brokerage firm allegedly pretended to be a ministry. Indeed, no one advocates more strongly for prosecuting bad actors in our space than the ministries themselves, and the most reliable ministries participate in a rigorous annual accreditation process through the independent, third-party Health Care Sharing Accreditation Board.
It’s fine to disagree with our Christian faith, or to wish that everyone signed up for unaffordable Obamacare plans that often implicate enrollees in subsidizing a godless moral agenda. But this kind of orchestrated attack must be recognized for what it is: bigotry and intolerance toward religious Americans, their beliefs and their organizations, and a threat to the First Amendment protections of all Americans.
Jesus warned that His followers would be hated and persecuted. But our Founders designed a constitutional system that prohibited this kind of state-sponsored War on Christians. Voters should hold their legislators accountable for protecting the rights of believers to organize and provide for their own health care needs without government harassment, bought and paid for by organized atheist interests across the country.
Katy Talento, ND, is CEO of AllBetter Health, the Executive Director of the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries, and an epidemiologist and naturopathic doctor. She was the top health advisor on the White House Domestic Policy Council during the first Trump Administration.
