Let John Oliver and Rachel Dratch sell you a bogus health care plan – Gold Derby

On Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver exposed the health care sharing ministry industry, which utilizes semi-unregulated funds that are supposed to be for members of faith communities to contribute to in order to help each other pay for their health care costs. Put another way, they’re like health insurance funds for religious sects. But since they’re faith-affiliated, there are tax exemptions – mostly for the people running the funds. Meanwhile, the people paying into them are getting ripped off. Many HCSMs are taking a premise that has a lot of kindness in it – you’re getting help with your high medical bills from members of your community – and distorting it. Since it’s not health insurance, HCSM administrators can deny coverage for just about any reason, including discriminatory ones like denying people coverage because they’re gay. 

Oliver discovered that a health care sharing ministry is extremely easy to set up, especially in Florida, and that the requirements for what qualifies as a shared belief among members is very lax (it could kind of just be “we don’t believe in paying a lot of money for health care”). So he set up a Florida offshoot of the church he created in 2015 to show how easy it is to do in order to get that sweet, sweet tax exemption. The church is called Our Lady of Perpetual Health, and the church’s health care sharing ministry is called JohnnyCare. To promote JohnnyCare – which you can join if you’re a Florida resident by visiting freedomfromhealthcare.org – Oliver put on a televangelist persona and enlisted the help of “Saturday Night Live” veteran Rachel Dratch, dressed in the biggest televangelist’s wife wig you’ve ever seen. 

If you sign up for JohnnyCare, which costs $1.99, you’ll get a tiny first aid kit and nothing else. It’s not insurance, and it doesn’t cover your health care costs. The website features the organization’s statement of beliefs: 

• I believe in caring for one another (Galatians 6:2).
• I believe in not getting sick.
• I believe in not having a preexisting condition.
• I believe that I shouldn’t be paying for health care for anyone who might be sitting on their couch eating bonbons all day, every day.
• I believe it’s my right to direct my own health care, free from government restraints, dictates, and oversight.
• I believe in JohnnyCare’s right not to pay for my financial or medical needs.
• I believe all my health care needs can be managed with a mini first-aid kit.

There’s a lot more where that came from in the full segment, which goes in-depth on explaining what health care sharing ministries are and all the things that are wrong with them.

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