➡ Peggy Hall, from thehealthyamerican.org, shares her personal experience of not using traditional health insurance for over a decade. Instead, she uses a Christian health share company called Samaritan Ministries. She also promotes a collagen product that she claims has drastically improved her skin health. She criticizes United Healthcare for their poor treatment of people and encourages others to explore alternatives to traditional health insurance.
➡ The author shares her personal experience with healthcare costs, explaining how she transitioned from being able to afford her own medical care to struggling with increased costs. She suggests a system where everyone is given a debit card to cover their medical costs, maintaining a free market for insurance companies. She also shares her experience with paying out of pocket, which she found to be cheaper than having health insurance. Finally, she introduces the concept of Christian Health Share Ministries, where members send money directly to others in need of medical care, cutting out the middleman and allowing for more freedom in choosing doctors.
➡ The author shares her positive experience with Samaritan Ministries, a health share ministry. She pays $400 a month, and when she had a medical need, she paid out of pocket, submitted her receipts, and was reimbursed except for an initial $300. The ministry doesn’t cover certain things like birth control, psychiatric medicine, and dental work. She appreciates that the money goes directly to another person and that she receives support from the community in the form of letters and prayers.
➡ This has been more helpful to me than any usual health insurance.

Hey friends, Peggy hall, back with you from thehealthyamerican.org Every day people ask me what I do for health insurance because I don’t do health insurance. This is actually better and cheaper than health insurance. In the news is this very strange assassination of the CEO of United Healthcare. And United Healthcare has been really under the magnifying glass. There have been a lot of shady antics going on there. As a person who has been teaching people about their rights, their civil how to stand up against the discrimination that is perpetrated against them by corporations big and small, United Healthcare has been among the worst when it comes to their track record with treating people with dignity.

So I’m no fan of these health insurance companies. I’m sure that there are wonderful people, individuals that may have jobs in these companies, but I personally do not participate and I have not done so for well over a decade and it’s maybe even longer. I have to think back to when I very first stopped having health care. I think it was around the time when affordable care came on the scene, which made my health care unaffordable. So I had to find another way. And I’m going to share all of that with you in just a moment.

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So do yourself a favor, you can grab some while it is 51% off during their holiday promotion. You can go to healthwithpeggy.com that’s the link I want you to use. I’ll have it for you in the description box below. I want to tell you all these wonderful things. You get free VIP Health, live health and fitness coaching for life. You get a free ebook titled the 14 Foods for Amazing Skin. There is a 60 day satisfaction guarantee. You get free shipping with your order. Now I know you are going to love that this product is non gmo.

It is free of artificial colors, no artificial flavors or preservatives or sweeteners. It is gluten free. There are no antibiotics, no RBGH hormones or rbst. Now basically there is no odor and there’s basically no taste unlike some of those collagen supplements. And there’s no clumping when you mix it. So give it a try. Healthwithpeggy.com See if that’s a good fit for you. Friends, I get inquiries all the time about what I do instead of health insurance. And you don’t have to have traditional health insurance either. I know some of you have been with these major corporations, major companies and you’re being frustrated.

You’re being denied coverage. You are getting only a percentage of your payments being covered. And so I am going to share with you all of the information and all of the experiences that I’ve had over these many years. So what I’m about to share with you is my personal story of using non health insurance and it is a Christian health share company called Samaritan Ministries. I’ll have a link for you in the description box below. Be sure to get on my free substack peggy hall.substack.com what is it? It’s a free newsletter and it can be emailed to your inbox and I will have my written comments along with the link where you can learn more.

But I want you to sit back and enjoy my personal experience. What I have gone through, the different medical issues that I had and how that was paid for, what it cost, who paid for it, how it was paid without getting any insurance companies involved whatsoever. Friends, for at least a decade I have not had traditional health insurance and do you know in the old days it was called medical insurance. I have been researching the history of medical insurance in the United States. Let me know in a comment below if you know when that started and what the first medical insurance company was in the United States.

And then we’ll have a little guessing game here in just a moment. I can do another video if you’re interested, let me know in a comment below if you would like to hear more about the history of health insurance. What happened in 2014 when it became unaffordable for many people like myself and how it changed from being disability insurance and accident insurance. And then it was in 1965 when Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Medicare and basically that was a part of the entire socialistic government doodads that were offered to us in that period of time.

So I can do a deep dive on that if you want. But what I really want to talk to you about is what I do instead of health insurance. Now I just got the newsletter that comes out and it’s called some. I know I have a. My fake background right there, my virtual background. I’m not always in a place where I have a nice background to film so this does the trick. So there is the Samaritan Ministries and I will leave a link for you in the description box below. So let me just give you a little bit of background prior, let’s see to about.

So it’s almost been 10 years. It was 2014 when I changed and prior to that I had been an employee at different colleges and universities. So I always had my health insurance paid for by my employer. And that is a very common scenario for people that work full time. That’s one of the perks or the benefits. Just like having, you know, your vacation time. Although now I think in the United States sick days are required by the government. Maybe it is a state law but I know that that has changed over the years as well. Many people get health insurance through their employer.

So believe it or not, if you have been watching my videos over the last few years, you know that I am no fan of Kaiser Permanente, which is the huge health insurance and hospital here in California. But for many years that was the employer’s plan was Kaiser. I actually was very pleased with the Kaiser care that I had. I didn’t really have a lot of procedures or anything but if I needed to go just get whatever needed to be done. I had a $25 co pay. So that means if I had to go see the doctor that would be $25.

So again that would be like let’s just round it off to about 2010 up till about 2013. And then I had zero deductible and the school paid for me and my husband as a part of the health, you know, part of our benefits. And it was probably, I think they, they said it was probably around $300 a month. Something like that. Then when I was no longer employed by the school and I was doing my own entrepreneurial work and so forth, I paid for my own health insurance and I still had it through Kaiser. And so for my husband and I together again, I feel like it was around maybe $420 $5 deductible.

No, I’m sorry, $25 co pay, no deductible. And then there probably were limits in terms of prescriptions and maybe hospitalization and that kind of thing. I’m very healthy. I never really had to use any of that. I’m not on any prescription medicine, so I’m not. I don’t recall exactly what that was, but I do know that it was affordable. So incomes. I think it was 2014 when everything was changed in this country illegally and unconstitutionally to require you to pay a tax if you did not have health care. And of course that was intended to create this sort of scenario of healthcare for all.

And trust me, I get it. I know people that did not have their medical costs paid by their employer and I know that it was getting more and more expensive as the years went on. So I get it. Now most states have, have some type of safety net for people like that who can’t afford health insurance. Many of these hospitals and urgent care centers and other community centers would have a sliding scale for people to pay. Maybe that’s just in California, maybe it’s not in every state. But I know that people were able to get healthcare at a sliding scale.

And often if they had to have emergency hospitalization or something, the hospitals had their own charities that were funded. And I know people personally who had 100% of their medical bills paid for through these charities. So I do not know anyone personally who fell through the cracks and didn’t get health care that they needed. So that is just my own experience. Yours. Your mileage may vary, but what happened is I went from a person who was able to afford paying for my own medical care to somebody who was unable to pay for it. Because again, at this part I was working part time and I was running my own business.

And so I didn’t have an employ lawyer to pay for my health care. And the Kaiser fee that went from, like I said, was just under $400. It was like 397. It suddenly went for the two of us, it went to $1,500 a month with a $5,000 deductible per person and you know, per visit fee also went up. I think it was maybe $75. It was absolutely ridiculous. How in the non spinning world can anybody afford that kind of medical care when you don’t have an employer paying for it? And that’s where all of these government subsidies come in.

I didn’t want a government subsidy. I didn’t apply for a government subsidy. I don’t even think that I could have qualified for it. I was probably on that edge of where I wasn’t making. I was making enough money that I couldn’t qualify for the government assistance. But I didn’t want it anyway. So I immediately canceled the Kaiser insurance. Back in the day I remember thinking, if the government really wants to make sure that everybody is covered, why don’t they just issue a debit card, for example, for let’s say $5,000? It cost me and my husband roughly $5,000 a year for our medical cost.

And that again, we were able to see the doctor for $25. We didn’t have any copay beyond that. There were no deductibles. So I thought if everybody got a card they can go choose to go to Kaiser or they could go to Blue Cross. And that way it would have still maintained the free market where these insurance companies still could offer the plans that they wanted. Because now everything is strictly regulated by the government. What they have to offer at different levels and so forth. So for a long time I did not have any health insurance at all.

I just refused to pay for it. It was my own non compliance back in the day, just like now. I never saw the legitimacy of me being forced to have health insurance when I am a healthy person and I would pay out of pocket. I did have a broken foot some years ago and I just went to the doctor and I told them I don’t have health insurance. It was kind of funny because I was in the waiting room and the girl at the desk kind of blurts out who’s your health insurance? Which I thought was kind of weird, everybody sitting around and I said, well, I used to have Kaiser until the Unaffordable Care act came around and now I can’t afford it.

So I pay out of pocket. And I said that for everybody to hear. And the good news is that when you pay out of pocket it is actually cheaper than when you have your health insurance. What I mean is that maybe it is not 100% but every experience that I have had and I am going to tell you about my health care sharing in just a moment. But every time that I have paid out of pocket and I have told them I am a Cash patient, I am a private pay. Those are some of the phrases that you use, I am paying out of pocket, that kind of thing.

They normally reduce the price, and they reduce the price because they don’t have to pad the bill in order to get the reimbursement from Medicare or the insurance companies. So for my broken foot, the doctor’s visit and the X rays and the cast came out to a total of $50. And I think that was fair. And the doctor apparently thought it was fair because he would have had to pad that bill in order to get the $50 reimbursement from whoever he submits these claims to. Plus there was no paperwork, no staff was needed to do that.

So he felt that was a fair fee. And I thought it was a fair fee. When we look back at the history of healthcare, that’s how it used to be. You would just pay for your services as you go. Kind of like car insurance. You have car insurance in case you’re in an accident or you have major damage to your car. But I do not know of any car insurance that pays for your tires and your brakes and your oil and gas in your car. So why should these insurance plans pay for all of those other things? Now, my mom was in the medical profession for over 40 years.

She worked in the ER, so she was all about trauma medicine. Patch them up, get them out. She did not care for the mainstream medical merry go round. And she did tell me that when these medical insurance things changed, people would show up all the time because they felt like they were getting care for free. Whereas normally maybe they had a headache or a stomach ache. Maybe they would wait 24 hours, take a nap, couple aspirin, see if they felt bad. Better now they felt as if any little thing, they could go running to the doctor because it was covered.

Let me know if you have experienced that or if you can relate to what I’m talking about. So as time went on, I realized that I did want to have some kind of coverage in case there was an accident or some kind of illness that would have been more difficult for me to pay out of pocket. And this is where I researched different Christian Health Share ministries. This is not medical insurance. It is not health insurance. It is a sharing group and it is fantastic. I am going to explain exactly how it works. It may be different because I have belonged to this with my husband for many years.

So their program may be different. I am not giving you any advice. I am not going to. You know, your mileage may vary, as I said, Previously, I am just going to share my experience. So for the two of us, it is around $400 a month. We do not send a check to any insurance company. We send what is called our share because it is a health share ministry. We send our share to another member in the ministry. So we get a statement every month that says, this person is in need of healing and prayer. And here is who you we would like you to send your share to.

And so we send a check. We send. Actually, I’m not going to take that right now. Speaking of doctors, we send a check to the person who needs to have our financial assistance and then they actually get that check, they deposit it in the bank and they use that for their healthcare needs. And that’s what it’s called. It’s called a need. So when I had my eye surgeries, I had several procedures, surgeries to restore my vision. And here’s what I did. I could go to any doctor that I wanted to go to. I did not have to be in any plan.

I did not have to be in any group. I did not have to have any approvals. I could go to any doctor I wanted to. So this cuts out a lot of the middlemen. You can go to who you want to. You don’t have to have any approvals. Now, the only sticking point is that because you don’t have health insurance, you are paying out of pocket. And there are a couple of ways of doing it. If you have the means to pay for it right then and there, then you can pay for it. If you don’t, then you would need to.

Again, this is not my advice. This is just what some people have done. Then you would need to create an arrangement with the doctor whereby you pay the doctor after you get your reimbursement through the other ministry members who are sending you the money. And that usually takes about three months. Many doctors and medical centers are aware of this. Samaritan Ministries is the one I belong to. I will have a link for you. In fact, let me take you right on over there. This is it. It is called Samaritan Ministries.org not to be confused with Samaritan’s Purse or any other, you know, Christian organization.

This is exactly what they say, a community of Christians paying one another’s medical bills. So this is. I researched many of them. There are a few out there. This is the one that really appealed to me. It was the most straightforward. It was actually the least expensive. My husband and I pay. It’s about $400 a month for Both of us now once a year that $400 does go to Samaritan Ministries to cover their administrative cost of publishing these needs and sending them out in the mail and you know, following up on all of that. So when I had my need, I went to the doctor, I paid out of pocket.

I got the discount because I was paying out of pocket. I have never been turned away from any doctor because I don’t have health insurance. I tell them that I have the health share ministry, they are very familiar with this. And then I get a receipt and then you submit your receipts and there’s a whole way of doing it online. And the only amount of money that I paid was $300. That would be, it’s. They don’t really call it a deductible, but that would be your portion of that need. So anytime you have a different need, let’s say I had to have, I don’t know, a back X ray or something like that, then that’s completely different than my eye.

But every single thing that was related to my eye, all of the prescriptions, all of the follow up appointments, all of the hospitalization, all of the pre op work, everything was covered 100% except for that initial $300. These procedures were in the tens of thousands of dollars. It went on for a couple of years. It completely was approved, went through. Now they don’t approve certain things like abortion. They don’t pay for any kind of birth control. And there are some other things that they don’t cover. I think maybe psychiatric medicine, dental work. I think they don’t pay for glasses.

But I had the eye surgeries because that was a medical situation. You would have to read all of the things to see. And if you do have any preexisting conditions, you would need to read carefully what restrictions there might be. I don’t know if there’s a waiting period. I don’t have any preconceived or pre existing or preconceived conditions. So that didn’t apply to me. What I love about this is the money goes directly to another person. So when I was recovering, I received checks in the mail that then I used to reimburse myself because remember I paid out of pocket.

And if you had an arrangement with the doctor where you didn’t have to pay immediately but you paid later, you would use that money to pay your medical bills. The other beautiful thing about this is people, people would send letters and notes and cars, cards and healing prayers. And so I felt like I was being, and I was I was being prayed for, I was being cared about from other people in this ministry. It is absolutely amazing. Now, I am not of the age of Social Security or what is that called? Social Security or Medicare. But in the years that come, I understand that that is something that you have to.

You are required to get. So I don’t have that and I don’t know how that would change what I am doing right now. But because it is a health share ministry, I can belong to it. Even if I never have a need or make a claim, I can still belong to it. I can still send money to people that need that to help cover their bills. Now, in a blue moon, if I needed something, I do not know, maybe I had a rash and I had to go buy a cream pharmacy or something. If it’s under $300, you don’t put in for that need because $300 is the bare minimum.

So for things like that, I do pay out of pocket. I really like this kind of situation because it reminds me of the way that healthcare used to be in the old days. Now I remember. Well, I don’t really remember, but I know as a child I don’t think my parents had health insurance. I mean it doesn’t strike me as if they did because I kind of remember, you know, my mom writing a check to the dentist or something. So I get it’s not that clear. But I have a feeling that that wasn’t really that widespread probably until maybe the 70s, maybe the 80s.

I need to do a little bit more research. If you’re interested. I would love to do a video on that because things are really changing and they will continue to change as the powers that shouldn’t be want to have more and more control over our healthcare. Let me take a look at your questions and comments and see if you have any questions here. Let me know if you are in a health share ministry. Todd. Hey Todd. Can’t wait to bring you on an interview one of these days soon. Tell about your story. He stood up against his employer and he writes that I am speaking his language.

In the medical field. It is crazy to see how cash, what cash covers. The hospitals will take in any amount in cash just so they get something that is really interesting. So that is something that the ministry, Samaritan Ministry actually will give you some how to’s, how to negotiate the bill if you want to ways that you can ask for the discount. And again there is so much that is padded into these bills that generally speaking they are happy to take the Cash. The other thing is, I’m all in favor of cash. I do not want to go to these cashless systems.

Oh, my gosh. I’ve been having such a difficult time. My bank was bought by another bank and so they changed all my bank accounts and bank numbers and all of that. I can’t even get to an actual person without waiting. Seems like hours before I can speak to somebody. And even then, it’s very convoluted. So it. We’re so close to not having any control over our cash. So I want to keep that cold, hard cash. All right, who am I says it wasn’t pushed until around the 1980s. That’s very interesting. Okay. Yes, I like. Okay, looking at a few others.

Thank you everybody for being on board. This is an interesting comment. Vin Lago says in the usa, if you have insurance of any kind, it’s illegal for them to let you pay cash with without filing an insurance claim. Well, you probably can pay cash for your deductible. Again, I have no idea how traditional health insurance works because I’ve not had it for many, many years. Okay. All right. Oh, my gosh. Aletta said she tried to pay cash for the son and her son and they said they didn’t accept cash. That’s absolutely crazy. Flower garden says here in Minnesota.

I paid $285 for an office visit paying cash. All I wanted was to get on migraine medications. Of course they said they will have to run tests which will be way more. I hope you’ll find some healing in a natural approach as well. So if you are interested, I want you to go to this Samaritan Ministries dot com. I’ve got something else I want to share with you too. So let me share my screen. And this is it. Samaritan ministries.com. you can click in there. Read all about the different sort of programs that they have. How to become a member.

Look. Oh, my gosh. 30. Does that say 30 million is my math right? Medical bills shared monthly. That’s crazy. Okay, I must have the classic sharing starts after $400. Mine used to be 300. Again, I have not had a claim in a long, long time. Qualifying bills are shared 100% after the initial 400. Generous maternity care, ideal for families. Now this is a little bit different. I’m not familiar with the Samaritan basic. I think this is more like traditional where you don’t have to pay out of pocket. Again, I want you to do the research. I’m just here to show you many of you asked me about that.

What I find astonishing is how expensive veterinarian care is these days. I am all about the preventative medicine. I actually don’t even like to use that phrase. I am all about staying healthy. I am all about elevating my own physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, intellectual health so that I don’t have to participate in the mainstream medical merry go round. Now I know sometimes these things happen. You break your foot, you get a rash, something happens, you have an accident, you do want to be prepared. But for the everyday health, there are so many things that we can do that do not require any of that mainstream medical merry go round manipulation.

So I will have a link for you below. Thank you everybody for being on board. You check out the Samaritan ministries.org It is so affordable. I have been so happy with it. I am grateful for all of the people that are a part of that ministry because that is how you render all of those hogwashers insignificant. You work outside of the system to the best of your ability and I believe personally that this has served me better than any traditional health insurance.
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See more of The Healthy American Peggy Hall on their Public Channel and the MPN The Healthy American Peggy Hall channel.