Freed from insurance: Health care sharing ministries and the moralization of health care.
Since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed in 2010, health care freedom has become a kind of mega-narrative trumpeted by Republicans leaders who decry government overreach. I turn to faith-based, non-profit organizations called "health care sharing ministries"(HCSMs) to consider the work that this mega-narrative does in everyday health care lives. While HCSMs are not insurance, HCSMs share in the payment of medical bills and are written into the ACA as one religious exemption to the individual mandate. Based on ethnographic interviewing done with 31 people in Maryland, Ohio, Virginia, and Pennsylvania between 2015 and 2020, I examine the ways that Americans who belong to HCSMs take up freedom as a guiding frame to reflect on and moralize their health care. I argue that articulations of freedom in HCSMs involve freedom from the constraints of bureaucratic care and governmental control and are tethered to a single, overarching moral discourse that presents freedom as the freedom of choice. I suggest, therefore, that being a part of an HCSM is about getting health care-including getting it cheap-but it is also about how the health care makes people feel as moral persons in the current political climate of U.S. life.
['Schwarz|Carolyn|C|']
D003695:Delivery of Health Care D006801:Humans D019458:Insurance Coverage D007348:Insurance, Health D008396:Maryland D009820:Ohio D058991:Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act D010414:Pennsylvania D014481:United States D014768:Virginia
health care Affordable Care Act freedom [Key words: insurance medical anthropology]