It’s been a while since I’ve made any new posts! My apologies for that. When covid hit my life got extremely busy and I don’t think things ever really slowed down from there. (I didn’t adjust well to that chaos LOL) Our family is still active with our Samaritan Membership, and very happy about it. We happily continue to pay our shares every month. In fact, our annual renewal is coming up in November, I believe it will make 10 years that we have been members. A few things have changed over the years in terms of cost, which I have tried to keep up with, and there have been a few minor guideline changes as well. The most significant changes are really to cost. Medical care is climbing at a crazy fast rate, and while Samaritan members enjoy lower monthly costs than most insurance programs, we are not immune to those monthly shares increasing. On the flip side, my potential insurance premiums are also still increasing. I haven’t posted that comparison on the site in a while, but suffice to say we are still saving THOUSANDS per year by being Samaritan members. Honestly I do not know how people are paying those premiums for insurance. $2000-$3000 a month? Seriously? But I digress…
The Samaritan leadership has worked hard to tweak and adjust the program for the good of the entire membership, and to help keep our monthly costs as low as possible. The addition of Samaritan Basic a few years ago was an excellent idea and a great alternative for families who are budget stressed and are willing to shoulder a little more of their incident expenses on their own.
In the past, share increase proposals came only after prorating had occurred for 3 consecutive months. With prorating happening a little more often, starting in 2023 (I suppose actually 2024 since we just had a share increase in Sept), the board is going to make regular annual increase proposals to help prevent any new increase from being shockingly large. By doing small incremental changes it should hopefully reduce the strain on families and their budgets.
Telemedicine is no longer going to be an offering in our Samaritan dashboards, there weren’t enough people using it and Samaritan’s costs associated with it could be better spent elsewhere. However, there are already affordable telemed choices out there we can use such as Sesame Care, K Health, Blueberry Pediatrics, CallonDoc, etc. You can check out a few to see which is available for your state and specific need type.
Once you join Samaritan, there is a very active facebook group of members (Samaritan Ministries Community) which is an excellent resource for how other members are navigating their health care. I’ve learned a ton of valuable tips and the search feature is also very beneficial.
Anyway, thanks for reading this blog, I still wholeheartedly recommend Samaritan after these (almost) 10 years, and hope that you can find your way to affordable, relatively stress-free health care for your family.