Christian home business owners confront the question of medical insurance for their families every day.
If you’ve left the traditional workforce, you’ve probably left behind old school medical insurance.
But it doesn’t have to be a problem for your family.
In fact, Christian home business owners have some good options.
Before we get to that, though, in Part One of this series you have to come to a Christian understanding of what medical insurance is and what it is not.
So where do Christian Home Business owners go wrong in the way they view medical insurance?
Understand something very important. Medical insurance is supposed to be medical COST insurance. It is supposed to help defray the cost of a lot of our medical care expenses but especially extraordinary medical expenses. It isn’t REALLY meant to pay everything all the time and everywhere.
I know.
That’s not what you grew up hearing or what you’ve been hearing the last many years.
The media and lots of public opinion spread several lies about medical insurance that bog Christians down. Here are the top three lies:
- Possession of medical insurance equals access to medical care;
- Medical insurance is health insurance; and
- You should be able to pay a flat fee and then have everything covered.
Access to medical care is not determined by whether or not you have medical insurance. Even the poorest of people can access medical care. But what we’re really talking about in all of this is not strictly access but the ability to pay for the care that you receive. So let’s be upfront about what the REAL issue is.
And it is an especially cruel lie to say that if you have medical insurance you have health insurance. Medical insurance is never…repeat NEVER….a guarantee that you will protect or even repair your health. That mindset reinforces the idea that the answers to all of our problems lie in drugs and doctors. We all need to go to the doctor sometimes. But our lifestyle choices and nutrition decisions are our health insurance.
Insurance did morph over time into a system that got the majority of Christians in traditional jobs used to low premiums, low deductibles, and low co-pays in exchange for most everything being covered and paid for. That was a great blessing when it existed, but those days are pretty well gone. Whether those policies were really a good thing is not relevant at this point. As Christians, we have to deal in the realities of the world in which we live.
This post is not about the evils of Obamacare. You can find that elsewhere with great elucidation.
And frankly, the complexities of our medical system are beyond the point of this post.
Suffice to say that medical costs evolved historically in response to medical insurance so that medical costs became inflated. That leaves a lot of Christians seeking assistance with medical costs out in the cold whether they have traditional jobs or not.
But Christian home business owners face a greater challenge shielding themselves from medical care expenses.
Think about other insurance that you pay for. You have car insurance. Does it cover maintenance and licensing/registration fees? Of course not. And you don’t expect it to.
Does your homeowner’s insurance cover your air conditioner when it goes out or your windows when they need to be replaced? Of course not. And you don’t expect it to.
It would be nice if insurance covered all those things as they can eat up more of a Christian family’s budget than routine medical expenses.
I’m not saying that medical insurance is an apples to apples comparison with homeowner’s insurance. I simply give the examples so that people have a sense of the skewed perspective we’ve developed as a society.
And let’s also be candid.
Medical insurance has morphed again to a place where most Christians who have it (whether they work a traditional job or are home business owners) find that it serves more as a protection against an extraordinary medical expense (like cancer) rather than a routine catch-all for every doctor visit, test, or prescription.
We are charged as Christians to take care of our temples. But don’t deceive yourself. Nowhere in the Oral or Written Tradition (i.e. Sacred Scripture) of the Church is there a mandate that this care be provided to us without cost to ourselves.
We are obligated to care for the poor who literally have no means to care for themselves.
We are obligated to work in order to eat out daily bread.
But nothing in Church Teaching says that your medical care has to be free or virtually free.
The result?
Medical insurance actually ended up driving Christians further away from the ability to care for their temples in accordance with our believes and our doctors’ good care.
Also, too many of us for too long paid for services for others that go against God’s Law. We did that every time we participated in a company insurance plan. It didn’t take Obamacare to create that problem. Obamacare just made it law.
And nowhere in the current concept of medical insurance do we find a Christian community bearing one another’s burdens. Medical insurance evolved over time to destroy the concept of Christian charity toward our neighbors.
So what should Christians expect from their medical insurance?
For Christian home business owners, medical insurance should be:
- a way to protect your family against the reality of devastating medical expenses;
- a means to help with a lot of the ongoing medical expenses families face based solely on what your doctor says you need;
- freedom to care for your temples in accordance with Christian dogma;
- a tool to empower Christians in the support of each other; and
- free from even passive means that aid or abet anyone else in sinful activities.
So how do you get that medical cost protection if you don’t have a traditional job, can’t afford traditional insurance on your own, and don’t want to pay for evil behavior?
For some reflections on those options, check out Part Two of this series.
And feel free to comment below to discuss points raised in this overview and share this post if you got value from it.
