When their son Sky was born four years ago, Lindsie and Chris Bergevin were hit with a big surprise: $7,000 in bills for the birth that their health plan didn’t cover. Sky was two when the couple jettisoned their medical insurance, which helped them eventually pay off the debt.
Now that they’re ready to have a second child, they’re not going back to their old coverage, with its premiums of more than $350 a month. Instead, they’ve patched together an alternative through a religious group and a primary-care doctor whom they can visit anytime for a monthly fee.
“I was so jaded with the whole health-care insurance situation,” Lindsie, 35, says. “I just didn’t want to deal with it.”
The Bergevins, who rent a snug little house near downtown Boise, Idaho, are joining a small but growing number of Americans rigging their own medical safety nets. They’re frustrated by the high costs, opaque pricing, and maddening bureaucracy of health insurance.
In their quest for a different way, they’re meeting doctors like Julie Gunther who are also fed up. These physicians have opted to reject insurance, instead charging patients directly in return for more personalized care.
“I like to think we can protect people in vulnerable moments where they’re going to get lost like a widget,” Gunther said, “because they’re not a widget for us.”
Bloomberg News is following people who are uninsured in a year-long effort to tell the story of Americans struggling to afford the rising costs of health care, and the financial and medical trade-offs they make.
No reliable data exist on how many people are replacing insurance with arrangements like the Bergevins’, but the trend appears to be gaining momentum.
The number of people joining so-called health-care sharing ministries—religion-based cost-sharing plans—rose 74 percent from 2014 to 2016, according to the latest Internal Revenue Service data. An alliance for the groups said that more than 1 million people now participate in such programs. Similarly, primary-care clinics like the one Julie Gunther started in 2014 have grown to almost 900 from just a handful in the early 2000s, according to the Direct Primary Care Coalition, a trade group for the clinics.
The number of people without traditional insurance is expected to increase. The Trump Administration lifted the Affordable Care Act’s penalty for those who go without insurance, while also encouraging the growth of lightly regulated products such as short-term health plans. Proponents of Obamacare fear the administration’s actions will draw healthy people out of the ACA marketplaces, raising costs for those who remain.