Liberty HealthShare
Category: Health care sharing ministry
Founders: Dale Bellis, Drudy Abel, and Larry Foster
Current Leadership: Dorsey Morrow, CEO since 2021
Founded: 2014
Location: Canton, OH
Representative products: members can choose from a variety of plans, including
Liberty Unite, Liberty Essential, Liberty Freedom, and Liberty Dental.
At a glance:
Began in 1982 as the Christian Brotherhood Newsletter. For a monthly fee of $75, subscribers could ask other subscribers to pay any medical bills they incurred.
Liberty HealthShare is not an insurance company. It is a nonprofit Christian ministry that describes itself as “a like minded community of health-conscious individuals and families that want to make wise healthcare decisions.”
Like all health share ministries, Liberty makes the following mandatory disclosure: “This program does not guarantee or promise that your medical bills will be paid or assigned to others for payment. Whether anyone chooses to pay your medical bills will be totally voluntary.”
Members deposit a monthly “share” to the community, with the expectation that the community will share any medial expenses they may incur in the future. Such arrangements have existed in Amish and Mennonite communities since the early 1900s. In more recent years, they have spread to mainstream Christianity.
The modern health sharing industry took off with the passage of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which exempted those enrolled in health sharing programs from the individual mandate.
Beginning in 2016, Liberty began rejecting claims and failing to reimburse both members and health care providers. Alleged misuse of member funds and self-dealing resulted in a growing backlog of unpaid bills mounted, with members on the hook for often catastrophic amounts of debt.
A 2022 settlement with the Ohio attorney general ordered Liberty, as well as for-profit vendors it employed, to set aside millions of dollars to compensate former and current members. In addition, Liberty management was fired and barred from working for the company.
Under CEO Dorsey Morrow, Liberty has been methodically paying off the backlog of money owed to members while continuing to grow.
In his own words (CEO Dorsey Morrow):
We’re not looking to shy away from the issues Liberty has had in the past – in fact, it’s just the opposite. When I was appointed in 2021, the first thing we did was sit down and take note of any shortcomings. It was important for us to dig in and develop intentional, comprehensive plans for how we were going to fix things going forward – how we were going to provide the type of service our members need and deserve. The work is never done; that’s true for every company. We’ve made substantial progress, and I’m very proud of where we are, and where we are headed, as a ministry.
We take inspiration from Galatians 6:2: “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” Now, [the apostle Paul] doesn’t say that you need to carry every load. Carry your own load [if you can]. A burden is something that we can’t handle on our own. And so that’s what we’re about. We’re just here to help facilitate believers all over the country helping each other.
I’m an attorney, a former judge, and a mediator. And I’ve just been involved in nonprofit organizations now for probably the past 25 years or so. And so when this position opened up, I said, yeah, this is it for me.
Ninety-four cents out of every dollar that our members contribute, we use to share into medical bills. The other six cents out of every dollar we use to pay salaries, to keep the lights on, pay the IT bill. … Transparency is very important to us.
I love this job because I get to work with a lot of fantastic people, both the staff that work here at Liberty, as well as our members. Our members know that they can [talk to us] if they’ve got an issue with anything. We love listening to options and ideas. We are constantly evolving. … If you call Liberty HealthShare, you’re going to be talking to somebody right here in Canton, Ohio. So we are very proud of that. We want to maintain that connection with our membership. And we’ve got a number of people on staff that are very comfortable praying and writing cards and engaging our members on the spiritual side as well.
