The Top Questions About Christian Healthcare Ministries

The cost of health care can be huge—and sometimes catastrophic! Health insurance can also be expensive, and if your insurance plan isn’t great, you can be left holding the bag for a lot of your health care costs. So maybe you’re looking into health share plans as an alternative to traditional health insurance. Smart move!

As inflation looms, causing prices for everything to go up, health cost sharing is getting pretty popular. (Health cost sharing just means that members of the plan help pay each other's medical bills.) It lets participants have each other’s backs in tough times—and by cutting out a lot of red tape, cost sharing has been able to keep participant costs low.

We not only love health cost sharing plans as an alternative to traditional health insurance, we even have a trusted partner we highly recommend—Christian Healthcare Ministries.

What Is Christian Healthcare Ministries?

Christian Healthcare Ministries (CHM) is one of the oldest and best health sharing plans on the market. CHM follows a simple biblical model—helping Christians share health care costs like medical tests, maternity, hospitalization and surgery. For over four decades, the ministry has helped thousands of families and individuals get vital medical cost support and saved many families from the kind of financial ruin medical debt can bring.

The founders of CHM believe that sharing the burden of medical expenses with neighbors is a key part of true Christian charity. Since 1981, CHM has been helping Christians put that belief into practice by pooling the resources of families, churches and ministries—and encouraging participants to pray for each other’s health.

As a nonprofit ministry (technically not insurance), CHM helps hundreds of thousands of members each year satisfy their medical needs in all 50 states and overseas.

How Does Christian Healthcare Ministries Work?

Unlike traditional insurance, CHM has no contracts for members. Any Christian can join at any time and help share medical costs by simply doing two things:

• Agreeing to the CHM statement of faith, and
• Making a pre-set monthly contribution to CHM, determined by the program you choose (and yes, the more you pay, the greater amount of cost sharing when you submit eligible medical bills).

CHM uses your monthly contributions (kind of like the premiums you’re used to sending to health insurance companies) to fund sharing of all members’ eligible medical bills. Every time a CHM member submits a bill for cost sharing, the ministry’s independent trained staff reviews the bill for eligibility according to the ministry's guidelines. (More on that below.)

In more than four decades of operation, CHM members have exercised their faith and shared the cost of 100% of eligible medical bills. That’s impressive track record!

Who Does CHM Make Sense For?

With the cost of health care rising annually, CHM makes sense for all kinds of people. While CHM is not health insurance, it is a federally certified exemption to the individual mandate under the U.S. Affordable Care Act. That means it’s a great option for anyone who doesn’t like being forced to pay for insurance that covers medical services that violate their religious beliefs.

Here are some of the other people CHM would probably appeal to:

• Christians who want to live out the biblical practice of bearing each other’s burdens
• A healthy family who wants to save money on their monthly health care budget
• Stay-at-home parents who can’t get health insurance through an employer or spousal benefit
• Someone in a job with no health insurance coverage for employees
• Someone who wants an affordable way to supplement Medicare
• Someone who is self-employed and looking for cost-effective health coverage

What Programs Does CHM Offer?

CHM offers four programs: CHM Bronze, CHM Silver, CHM Gold and CHM SeniorShare™. And like the Olympic medals, the benefits increase from CHM Bronze up to CHM Gold. Here are a few details.

CHM Bronze

• Qualifying amount of $6,000 per incident, annual personal responsibility of $6,000 per unit
• Includes:
• Inpatient and outpatient hospital services
• Surgery performed at medical facilities such as, but not limited to, hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers
• Maternity, $9,000 personal responsibility applies

CHM Silver

• Qualifying amount of $3,000 per incident, annual personal responsibility of $3,000 per unit
• Includes:
• Inpatient and outpatient hospital services
• Surgery performed at medical facilities such as, but not limited to, hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers
• Maternity, $5,000 personal responsibility applies

CHM Gold

• Qualifying amount of $1,250 per incident, annual personal responsibility of $1,250 per unit
• Includes:
• Inpatient and outpatient hospital services
• Urgent care
• Incident-related office visits and prescriptions
• Independent lab work and radiology
• Physical therapy (up to 45 visits per eligible injury or illness)
• Home health care (up to 45 visits per eligible injury or illness)
• Maternity, $2,500 personal responsibility applies
• CHM SeniorShare™ gift reduction (available to Gold members age 65 and older)

CHM SeniorShare™

• Qualifying amount of $500 per calendar year, annual personal responsibility of $0
• Includes:
• Inpatient and outpatient hospital incidents and surgery
• Urgent care
• Incident-related office visits and prescriptions
• Independent lab work and radiology
• Physical therapy (up to 45 visits per eligible injury or illness)
• Home health care (up to 45 visits per eligible injury or illness)

How Does Christian Healthcare Ministries Handle Catastrophic Medical Events?

CHM provides cost sharing for catastrophic medical events through CHM Plus. It’s a program that lets members contribute to other members’ medical bills that exceed the ordinary defined limit of $125,000 maximum lifetime sharing per illness. If something should happen that sends your bills for a certain illness above that threshold, CHM Plus would allow you to get more financial help beyond what you’ve already received through ordinary sharing. But you have to add it to your membership.

Do you have the right health insurance coverage? Connect with a Trusted pro today.

Members can add CHM Plus (kind of like a rider in an insurance package) at any time. In order to share the cost of an illness with CHM Plus, you would need to have already added it prior to experiencing any signs, symptoms, testing or treatment for the illness you need assistance with.

CHM Plus applies differently depending on the member’s selected program. Cost support for CHM Gold members is unlimited. CHM Silver and CHM Bronze members receive an additional $100,000 in cost support per illness, per year. So long as you maintain CHM Plus, you will receive your additional annual $100,000 in cost sharing on the anniversary of joining. Each illness, though, does have a lifetime maximum of $1 million in medical expenses.

I Have Preexisting Conditions: Is Christian Healthcare Ministries a Good Option?

Yes. Even for those with preexisting conditions, Christian Healthcare Ministries is a great way to meet health care costs. They offer two ways to share the cost of treatment for preexisting conditions:

• The Sharing Schedule
• CHM Give

We’ll talk a lot more below about both options, but for now it’s worth mentioning that the Sharing Schedule is only available to CHM Gold participants. But nobody’s getting left out here. For participants on any program, including CHM Silver and CHM Bronze, CHM Give is a great way to share the costs of maintained preexisting conditions.

Before we talk through how each of those features works, let’s define preexisting conditions and see how they can qualify for sharing in CHM.

What is a preexisting condition?

CHM defines this as any medical condition for which a member experiences signs, symptoms, testing or treatment (including routine or maintenance medications) before joining CHM. And those rules apply regardless of whether the member has received a diagnosis. If you’ve been suffering from a condition and it’s still happening, that’s a preexisting condition. Simple enough, right?

Now when it comes to cost sharing, CHM puts preexisting conditions into two basic categories, active and maintained. Active preexisting conditions don’t qualify for sharing (but they could qualify in the future, as described more below).

When you become a CHM member with a preexisting condition, only maintained conditions would qualify for sharing (and we’ll talk more below about what maintained means in terms of preexisting conditions).

Is it possible for a condition I have today to drop out of the preexisting category in the future?

Yes! A condition would no longer be considered preexisting (and would become eligible for future consideration in sharing) if all three of the following are true:

1. You go one year without signs, symptoms or treatment, and
2. You are not on a maintenance medication regimen for the condition, and
3. Your official medical records state that you no longer need treatment for the condition.

Then, if the condition should ever recur, you’ll be eligible to share the cost of treatment with other members in CHM, as long as the above criteria is met.

What about cancer?

For anyone with cancer as a preexisting condition, in order to be eligible for future sharing of cancer-related treatment, both of the following must be true:

1. Your medical records state that you are cancer-free or are no longer needing treatment, and
2. You have gone five years without any signs, symptoms, treatment or testing (routine follow-up appointments don’t count against the five years).

How does CHM define active vs. maintained conditions?

Active and maintained are the two basic categories of preexisting conditions. As already mentioned, only maintained preexisting conditions will qualify for sharing at the time you enroll in CHM. Active preexisting conditions unfortunately won’t qualify at that time.

But we’re all hoping that your condition clears up! And if, after becoming maintained, it should recur in the future, any related treatments would be eligible for sharing with CHM members.

Here's a little more detail on how CHM defines active vs. maintained conditions:

1. CHM considers a condition active (and rules out the sharing of related medical bills) if both of the following are true:
   • You’ve experienced any signs or symptoms either before or at the time of joining CHM, and/or
   • Your condition needs ongoing testing or treatment (other than maintenance medications). This applies regardless of whether you’ve received a medical diagnosis for the condition.
2. On the other hand, CHM deems your condition maintained when the following are all true:
   • You’ve gone at least 90 days without having any testing or treatment, and
   • Your medical provider says that no more testing or treatment is needed, and
   • Your medical records show you’re either cured or on a maintenance treatment regimen.

What are the preexisting conditions that may be eligible for sharing?

This is not an exhaustive list (and CHM may require medical records to decide if expenses from these conditions qualify as a maintained preexisting condition). But here’s a partial list of preexisting conditions which CHM members have successfully gotten covered shared in the past:

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)	Kidney disorders	Heart conditions (stents, pacemakers, medications, etc.)
Diabetes	Bunions	High blood pressure
Thyroid issues	Crohn’s disease	Arthritis
Joint pain	Glaucoma	High cholesterol
Cataracts	Cancer	Skin disorders
Asthma	Epilepsy	Congenital conditions
Back or neck pain	Menorrhagia	Carpal tunnel

What is the Sharing Schedule?

CHM offers a schedule to CHM Gold participants for how they receive assistance with eligible medical bills for maintained preexisting conditions. Here’s the deal:

1. In the first year of membership, up to $15,000 in bills related to a preexisting condition are eligible for sharing.
2. In the first two years of membership, up to $25,000 in costs for a preexisting condition are eligible for sharing ($15,000 during the first year plus $10,000 during the second year).
3. In the first three years of membership, bills for up to $50,000 for a preexisting condition are eligible for sharing ($15,000 during the first year plus $10,000 during the second year plus $25,000 during the third year).
4. After the third year of membership, the condition is no longer considered preexisting and is eligible for regular sharing.*

What is CHM Give?

It’s one of our favorite things about CHM! CHM Give encourages members to do two things:

• Share the costs of eligible bills that other members have received as a result of maintained preexisting conditions
• Pray for one another specifically about illnesses and medical needs

What makes it so beautiful is that the funds that flow through CHM Give are voluntary donations members make above and beyond their pre-set monthly contribution amounts. And what inspires these donations? CHM Give is an example of the love and care members have for one another as they are moved to give on top of their regular monthly contributions.

Each month, members are encouraged to donate. CHM's member newsletter includes a link to donate, or members can set up recurring monthly donations so that sharing these medical bills continues without a hitch!

Can switching programs affect my ability to share preexisting conditions?

Yes. Switching programs up or down may impact the sharing of current or ongoing expenses for preexisting conditions. Here are the three scenarios.

1. Switching to a lower program. Sometimes you have to save money by opting for fewer bells and whistles. We get it! But just be aware that when you downgrade your participation level in CHM, all eligible medical bills for a maintained preexisting condition will only be shared through CHM Give at the new lower program, no matter when the bills were submitted or incurred.
2. Switching from CHM Bronze to CHM Silver. Two things here. First, all preexisting illnesses previously shared on CHM Bronze will stay right at that CHM Bronze of sharing throughout the life of your membership. Then second (and this is awesome), any new illnesses which start after the CHM Silver start date will be treated and shared on the CHM Silver.
3. Switching to CHM Gold. Similar to switching up to CHM Silver, once an illness begins at a lower program, that’s the program of sharing where it will remain for the lifetime of the membership, or until the member is cured and free of signs, symptoms and treatment (including medications) for one year. This limitation applies regardless of whether medical bills have been previously submitted for sharing. Medical records may be requested. But the good news is that any new illnesses beginning after the CHM Gold start date will be considered for sharing at CHM Gold.

Do Doctors Accept Christian Healthcare Ministries?

Yes, thousands of doctors nationwide gladly work with CHM members and receive payment for services from CHM members.

In fact, any doctors who accept self-pay patients (aka patients who pay with cash) will accept CHM members. To date, CHM has worked with more than 100,000 health care providers nationwide.

So long as your bills are eligible for sharing within the CHM Guidelines outlined above—you have the flexibility to pick your own provider. But CHM encourages you to choose doctors who offer self-pay discounts, fair prices and reliable service. To help find highly rated doctors near you, Christian Healthcare Ministries even has a database of providers available through their Member Portal.

Ready to Get Excellent Health Care Support?

If you’d like to experience the perks that health share plans offer—lower costs, less red tape, a chance to help others, and health care expenses that line up with your personal beliefs—our RamseyTrusted provider Christian Healthcare Ministries (CHM) can help you figure out your options.

_{*The CHM Gold Schedule rules for sharing costs related to medical bills incurred from preexisting conditions are taken from the Christian Healthcare Ministries guidelines booklet.}