Paying for a Baby Without Insurance — Christian Healthcare Ministries Review

Health insurance is a hard topic, mostly because it’s so politicized and expensive. But today, I’m going to talk about it anyway, because I’ve been using an alternative to typical health insurance and it’s saving my family thousands of dollars throughout my two pregnancies.

This is just my personal experience and everyone’s situations and medical needs are different, so I encourage you to read this and then do your own research on what options may work best for your family and financial situation.

As of March 2022, I will officially be leaving CHM after 3 years in the program since my work will now offer health insurance. However, I still am a HUGE advocate for this plan as an alternative to traditional insurance and it was a very tough decision to leave.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 A QUICK BACKGROUND

I want to give you a quick peek into our family so you can understand our needs and see how they compare with your own.

My husband was in the Air Force for almost four years before a back injury resulted in a medical discharge. Basically, that means that my husband’s healthcare will be covered by the VA for the rest of his life. The downside to this is that his health coverage doesn’t extend to his wife or kids, so I had to find another option after we got married.

I work for a small family-run business, so I don’t get health care through work at the time. When we first got married, I decided to pay for my own plan through Anthem (aka BlueCross-BlueShield). Originally when I signed up for Anthem insurance in early 2016 I was paying $264.06 monthly. In late 2017, I got a letter stating that after the year was up, my bill was going to increase to $356 per month. That’s when I decided to start shopping for an alternative.

I had heard of healthcare sharing ministries through Dave Ramsey’s show, but I never gave it much thought until we were facing this big bump in medical expenses. We knew we wanted to start trying for a baby in 2018, so I needed to find something that would cover maternity costs without breaking the bank.

Enter Christian Healthcare Ministries.

🥼 WHAT IS CHM?

According to their website, “Christian Healthcare Ministries (CHM) is a nonprofit health cost sharing ministry through which Christians voluntarily share each other’s medical bills. It is not an insurance company.”

Essentially, CHM is an alternative to insurance that still legally meets all the tax requirements for insurance. Because CHM is not technically insurance, it works very differently from what you may be used to.

There are three payment tiers to choose from. Personally, I think paying the $205 monthly gift for the Gold Plan, is the most economical choice, especially if you’re used to paying more than double that with your current insurance. However, you can read about all the payment options here.

Every month, you pay your monthly gift amount. If you have medical expenses that come up that cost more than $500, $1000, or $5000 (depending on which plan you choose), you can submit those bills to CHM to “share” the cost of your bills. For clarity, I’m going to use the Gold Plan as a reference for the following example:

Let’s say you break your leg. You go to an emergency room, get an x-ray, get a cast and you tell the checkout clerk that you’re self-pay. They hand you a bill for $5,000, yikes.

• The first thing you do is ask for any self-pay discounts. (From my own experience, all my doctor bills have had AT LEAST a 25% discount available to me, often another 10–15% if I pay the bill within 90 days.) They tell you they offer a 25% discount on self-pay patients, bringing your total to $3,750.
• Next, you ask if they have any payment plans available, they tell you yes, you can pay a monthly $100 until the bill is paid in full, you sign up for the plan, pay the $100, and head home.
• Once you have the itemized bill from your doctor, you submit the Needs Processing Form, HIPAA agreement, a Letter of Explanation, and the Bill online to CHM.
• Over the next four months, you pay a total of $400 “out of pocket” on the payment plan.
• Within 120 days of your submission, CHM sends you a check for $3,750. You pay off the rest of the bill with that money and “refund” yourself the $400 you paid over the past four months and you’re done.

Here’s what happened:

• You got 100% of the medical bill covered by CHM because the medical incident totaled over $500. Although you had to front some of the costs, you end up paying nothing out of pocket after CHM sends you a check.
• Regular insurance has you pay your monthly bill (your deductible), plus a copay for doctor visits, and likely a percentage of your medical bills depending on the level of coverage you have. That means that you would’ve likely paid a copay on your emergency room visit, a percentage of a $5000 bill, plus 4 months of $350+ insurance deductibles for the coverage. With CHM, you paid $205 per month for your coverage and nothing for your broken leg.

CHM sounds great from this example, but I do want to mention that this is not for everyone. Because of the way CHM is structured, you NEED to have some sort of emergency medical savings built up to cover any expenses that might come up and need to be paid upfront.

If you have a provider that does not offer self-pay discounts or payment plans, you may be on the hook for the bill and have to wait for reimbursement. Every medical incident less than $500 on the gold plan will be your responsibility to pay out of pocket. If your provider does not offer payment plans, you might have to pay the bill in full and then wait for CHM to send you a check, up to 120 days later.

Here’s what my husband and I did to prepare for switching to CHM:

• We put $1000 into a medical savings account. This would cover simple $100 doctor visits and at least one medical incident costing less than $500 per year.
• We started a “baby fund” for medical expenses relating to a future pregnancy to pay some of the up-front costs.

CHM has been a huge blessing to our family this year. We were able to pay for our first baby and get all my maternity costs covered under their gold plan. So far, we have had nothing but good things to say about CHM. If you do decide this might be a good option for you and your family, keep reading for a little more info on the maternity side of things.

🖨 HOW I TRACK MY BILLS

Tracking all my bills and expenses has been super important to this process. I get bills from my doctor, then when I call to pay them I get additional discounts and a new bill to reflect those discounts, plus I get monthly statements on any payment plans we have in place, and I get billed separately for lab work. Keeping organized here is important so that I don’t forget to submit bills to CHM, but also so that I don’t submit one more than once and slow down the repayment process.

📂 SET UP A GOOGLE DRIVE FOLDER

The first thing I did was set up a folder in my Google Drive account called “Pregnancy”. Any bills, invoices, emails regarding bills, pre-payment plans, or paperwork involving my pregnancy live in this folder. I love using Google Drive because I can access the files from anywhere, and I can share them quickly with my husband in case he needs access to them.

I use a super simple app called Scanbot to turn any paper bills into PDFs. The app works great because I can save those PDFs straight into my Google Drive account and access them from my phone, laptop, or desktop computer whenever I need them. It also makes it easy to rename and file them with CHM.

As I save bills into the folder, I also track them in my bill tracker sheet.

⚖️ DOWNLOAD THE EXPENSE TRACKER FROM CHM

CHM has a super simple tracker that you can download from their site. It allows you to keep track of the invoices, doctor visits, and cost-sharing info all in one place. I saved mine as a Google Sheet file and I keep it in the same folder as all my bills and invoices so that I have quick access when I need it.

💸 HOW I PAY MY BILLS

Whenever I get a bill from my doctor, I call the billing department right away and ask if they have an early pay discount (I know they offer a 10% discount if you ask for it) — they say yes, take my card over the phone and send me a new bill with the updated amount.

After that, I transfer the amount I paid out of my “baby savings account” into my checking and deduct the cost from our budget. I make sure to send CHM my updated bill and within 120 days, they send us a check for the amount shared. I deposit that check into our baby savings account and call it good!

💰 HOW MUCH MONEY WE’VE SAVED

I paid for the gold plan at CHM which was a flat $150 per month in 2018–2019. In just monthly costs I saved $2472 in a one-year period by switching to CHM from Anthem. That alone was a huge saving for us and was much better utilized in our debt snowball. On top of that, we will have paid a total of $0 for my TWO entire pregnancies, labors, and deliveries by the time all the bills are paid and submitted.

Since I kept spreadsheets of my CHM journey with both of my pregnancies, I know that for baby #1 I paid a total of $17,203.45 and was reimbursed a total of $17,088.48. The only thing that wasn’t covered was the two immunizations I had while I was pregnant.

For baby #2 I paid a total of $19,428.99 and was reimbursed a total of $19,352.28 with the only bill not covered being bloodwork that I forgot to submit the bill for and eventually just paid myself (it would have been covered had I submitted it).

So, for two pregnancies, I paid exactly $191.68. In fact, I can tell you exactly how much I paid over the course of the three years:

Keep in mind, over those 3 years in the program, we added my daughter to the account, so we were paying for two people for over two years. The total over that time would have been $11,934 (if I had stuck with Anthem and not added my daughter or had a single price increase during that same time, I would have paid $28,836 in just monthly fees).

One of the best things about CHM is that they have an insanely generous referral program. For each person who signs up, I would get a month free. Luckily, I had a decent audience built on YouTube when I shared my video about my pregnancy with my daughter. Over three years with the program, I had a ton of people sign up with my link, making my actual total only $6,362!

To say I saved some money with this decision is an understatement.

📝 SIGNING UP WITH CHM

I did not write this post as a promotion to save me money, in fact, my account has actually been closed now and I no longer receive any benefit from sharing about CHM. I wrote this because I truly believe CHM is a wonderful alternative to typical insurance. It has saved my family and me a ton of money over these last few years and I believe it could save your family money if you have a similar situation to us.

That being said, this plan will not work for everyone. I highly recommend talking to your providers about their billing methods for “self-pay” patients, find out if they offer payment plans or discounts, and make sure if you are considering CHM for maternity costs, that you have CHM at least 3 months before becoming pregnant. You can find all the details about CHM on their site and you can call them and ask any questions you might have.

I hope if this is a good option for you, that it can bless your family in the way it has ours.

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