More Exemption Talk
A Chicago area woman is protesting religious symbols in the required vehicle sticker for Burbank, IL drivers. She's suing the city for an exemption from the sticker rule. Burbank officials now claim she could cover or remove the cross from the sticker, but her advocates claim that option has never been offered.
Meanwhile, the NYTimes offers another exemption-related piece today, a week after the completion of the controversial series the paper ran entitled "In God's Name." Part 5 focuses on something I've never heard about: medical-bill ministries, in which participants pool their money together to pay each other's medcal bills as needed. At issue--should these organizations be regulated like health insurance? And if given exemption, what are the limits?
E. John Reinhold, who once worked with the Campus Crusade for Christ and is now the ministry’s chairman, explains the concept simply: “You add up all the medical bills and divide by the number of sharing households. Everybody kicks in and you pay the bills.”Every month, in roughly 19,000 households across the country, ministry members — who must be observant Christians with recommendations from their pastors — write a check to Christian Care Ministry. The amount depends on their family’s size and how much of their medical bills they are willing to pay out of their own pocket.
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Mr. Reinhold, who formed Christian Care in 1993, says it is an efficient way for Christians to fulfill the admonition of Galatians 6:2, which tells them to “carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”But over the years, some state officials have looked at ministries like Christian Care and seen what they would call unregulated health insurance. Their concern is that confused consumers looking for low-cost coverage will rely on these groups as if they were insurance companies, even though the groups may lack the resources to pay claims.
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Kentucky was one of a half-dozen states that passed laws in the early 1990’s exempting religious bill-sharing ministries from state insurance laws. But regulators there say that Mr. Reinhold’s organization goes beyond what that exemption allows — a claim the Florida ministry says is misguided, because its practices actually improve on the state’s requirements.