If you have an insurance plan you assume and expect (and rightly so) that your monthly premium will automatically increase each year. Ours did. Pretty much everyone’s does. Each year we got a letter in the mail from Blue Cross telling us what our new premium was going to be (gasp, usually high double digit increase) and if we didn’t like it here were a few plans with much higher deductibles we could pick to keep the premium lower. Yuck. Eventually it just got to be too much. Premium still too high, deductible so high it was laughable and made the insurance basically worthless.
Now we have Samaritan Ministries. Our monthly share doesn’t increase each year automatically. In fact, the average time it takes for an increase to be voted on is every 18-30 months. That’s roughly every 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 YEARS. The last time the monthly share increase happened was Sept 2016. Prior to that it was July 2014. 26 months without a share increase. Wow. And the increases are not high double digits. The typical is 10-11%. Yup, that’s it. And did you notice I mentioned a vote? Members actually VOTE on whether to increase the monthly cost. It only becomes official if 60% agree. When was the last time your insurance company gave you a choice on what the monthly cost increase would be? Never.
Insurance companies increase your premium to help pay for rising medical costs, but also for their overly high salaries (CEOs making in the millions!), increasing administrative costs, and to pay for services some of us just don’t feel are right (abortions). Sorry, not doing that.
Because Samaritan monthly shares increase so slowly the gap between what Samaritan members pay each month and what insurance companies charge gets bigger every year. If there is a reduction in premium it comes with a steep increase in deductible. Not with Samaritan. We have a $300 personal responsibility per incident. $300! Compared to our $6350 deductible with Blue Cross that’s a huge difference! AND….this is awesome… if we get a discount on our medical bill Samaritan applies it to our $300 personal responsibility amount. So a discount of $100 means we only pay $200 out of pocket. A $300 discount means we pay NOTHING for that incident!! Honestly, can you imagine your health insurance company doing that? I think one of the auto insurance companies has that vanishing deductible deal, but no health insurance does that, and you pay extra each month for the privilege of a vanishing deductible. Samaritan doesn’t charge extra for this, they just do it!! Again, wow. So wonderful.
I feel like the blinders have been ripped off. How did I not see how much of a joke my old health insurance policy had become? Well, maybe I did actually, and just felt powerless to do anything about it. Thank goodness I found Samaritan Ministries.