What if instead of writing a check to a health insurance company you could write a check to Ann from Topeka, IL or Richard from Salt Lake City, UT? What if, when you needed to pay your healthcare costs you received a check from Ann in Topeka and Richard in Salt Lake City? At Samaritan Ministries, the ability to enter into a community that helps you just as much as you help them is their take on what healthcare should look like.
This is because Samaritan Ministries was built on and continues to emphasize the importance of trust. Participants in the program, of which several dozens of thousands exist, place trust into other individuals just like them and into a greater metaphysical power with causal influence. This is because, often times, being ill is about more than just needing medical and or financial support. Samaritan Ministries understands the necessity for mutual trust and respect among its community members so that its members can feel financially at ease and medically, emotionally, and spiritually healthy.
Many great men and women, including Enlightenment philosopher and physician John Locke, have emphasized the beauty in upholding the right to equality of opportunity. While most healthcare companies are furiously analyzing the actuarial science of what might happen and forecasting and adjusting rates accordingly, the staff at the Samaritan Ministries focus on fixing what has happened. Skeptics may fear that the risk of having community members directly contribute to paying other member’s medical costs are too great for them to consider joining. What’s remarkable is that this community of members have just two incentives and both have contributed to sharing the bills of every customer served.
Whether this is because every member understands that “The only time you should look in your neighbor’s bowl is to make sure that they have enough” or because they understand that being fiscally conservative when shopping around for medical care benefits them as much as it does the rest of the community, the satisfaction that customers feel while being helped and helping others suggests it may be both.
Today, welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, and unemployment insurance have destroyed mutual aid societies while making individuals dependent upon the federal government for their medical, financial, and emotional needs. What Samaritan Ministries offers is the power for individuals to take control of their own medical decisions within a supportive community framework. What’s more impressive is that their staff is extremely organized and able to keep customers extremely satisfied in the healthcare sector—the one place where the heartbreak caused by inconsiderate staff, excessive billing, and bureaucratic inefficiency is often irreparable, regardless of one’s health care coverage policy.
At Samaritan Ministries, individuals know that their community will help them regardless of whether they opt for the $68,572 or the $34,000 knee replacement surgery. However, what’s unique to this mutual aid community is that these members realize that they too are part of the very same community of individuals that helps them as much as they’re helping others. By participating in monthly payments for individual people themselves, participants in Samaritan Ministries become fiscally consciousness and responsible, because as one member put it, keeping the cost down of their own medical expenses keeps the costs down for the whole community. This sense of responsibility and ownership of medical decisions is unique to Samaritan Ministries; a name that you can trust because it trusts you.
Ella—innkeeper at the American Guest House, your preffered Washington DC Lodging
