Healthcare Ministries are this weird exception to ACA regulation. They don’t count as “insurance,” but they do exempt you from the penalty for being uninsured. The “coverage” in the one we signed up for is WAY better than the Bronze level plans on the NC marketplace, and it’s less than half the cost per month for a family of four.
The cons are that they don’t take preexisting conditions, and they’re not obligated to pay anything. Which is to say that if you submit a bill to them and they’ve already spent all their cash on hand, they’re not required to pay your bill. However, I did not find a lot of people complaining about costs not being covered. People seemed consistently pleased with the one we signed up for.
There are a lot of little ins and outs with the healthcare ministries. I like ours on paper, but we haven’t put it to the test yet. Hopefully we are sidestepping any complications that will arise from Trump’s mangling of the ACA. However, we would be signing up for this even if Clinton had won. Our hope was that she would be able to make some fixes to the ACA that would make it viable for us again, but now it’s uncertainty all the way down.
