How Liberty HealthShare Members Find Alternatives to Rising Healthcare Costs
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Rebecca and William Monroe retired early and spent their first year of retirement paying $1,500 a month for health insurance, with a $15,000 deductible standing between them and any help with a medical bill.
“We did that for one year and then we needed to find something better,” Rebecca Monroe said. A financial advisor suggested Liberty HealthShare, and after hearing from former work associates who were already members, the Monroes enrolled in 2018. “It was much more reasonable,” she said.
Monroe had a preexisting condition going into membership: a partial colon removal from years earlier. That history worried her at first. The bigger test came in 2019, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
What Changed When Monroe Got Sick
Monroe needed to see a specialist at a cancer facility on Florida’s east coast. The facility initially turned her down for an appointment because it didn’t recognize her Liberty HealthShare membership as a guarantee of payment and treated her request as it would treat someone with no way to pay at all. Unsure what to do next, Monroe called Liberty HealthShare for help.
A Liberty HealthShare representative offered to call the provider directly and explain how healthsharing works. “She said, ‘Let’s just do it together.’ What company does that anymore? I felt like she was on my team,” Monroe said. “She got it figured out with the provider.”
Seven years later, Monroe says providers in Florida, where she and her husband spend eight months of the year, rarely question her membership. Wisconsin, where the couple summers, is a different story. “It’s so much easier to use Liberty HealthShare down in Florida,” she said, adding that healthsharing is “still gaining traction” in Wisconsin.
The Cost Pressure Behind the Search for Alternatives
The Monroes are not alone in facing steep costs before ever needing care. The average cost of employer-sponsored health insurance reached $17,496 per employee in 2025, a 6 percent increase that outpaced both inflation and wage growth, according to Mercer’s national survey of employer health plans. Mercer projects that cost will climb past $18,500 per employee in 2026.
Workers who buy plans on their own face a steeper climb still. Insurers on ACA marketplaces are raising premiums by an estimated 26 percent for 2026, and most enrollees would face even sharper increases in what they pay if enhanced federal subsidies expire, according to KFF.
Liberty HealthShare functions as an alternative way of managing healthcare costs rather than a substitute for the care itself. Members choose their own providers, pay a monthly share amount voluntarily, and submit eligible medical bills for member sharing according to the ministry’s published Sharing Guidelines. The ministry currently offers six healthsharing programs, with monthly amounts starting at $89 for members 35 and younger and rising for programs with higher per-incident sharing limits and lower member Co-Share percentages. Submitting an eligible medical bill under that model isn’t a legal guarantee the way an insurance claim is. It depends on other members’ voluntary contributions and on the bill meeting the ministry’s published Sharing Guidelines.
Monroe’s search coincided with a broader shift. Liberty HealthShare has recorded 20 consecutive months of year-over-year enrollment growth, and enrollment during its most recent open enrollment period more than doubled compared with the prior year, Chief Executive Officer Dorsey Morrow said during an appearance on the Becker’s Healthcare Podcast. Morrow pointed to the same math the Monroes worked through years earlier: households weighing a fixed monthly share amount against premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs that keep climbing regardless of how healthy a household is in a given year.
Advocacy as Part of the Model
What Monroe describes as most valuable isn’t the monthly savings. It’s the direct contact with a person willing to intervene with a provider on her behalf. Liberty HealthShare’s Member/Provider Services department answered 9,535 calls from members and 4,904 calls from providers in the first quarter of 2026 alone, with an average speed to answer of just under 18 seconds for members. Executive Vice President of IT and Operations Robert Kintigh, who oversees the department, said the team’s approach goes beyond following a script. “They pray with our members and frequently follow up to check on members after they have had a medical procedure,” Kintigh said. “It isn’t something they are instructed to do, but something they do because they have a personal connection to those whom they have assisted.”
A Longer View
Monroe, now retired with five grandchildren and a habit of encouraging friends to “adopt, not shop” when it comes to rescue animals, says the two years her medical bills took longer to process, in 2019 and 2020, never changed how she felt treated. “Even when some of our medical bills took longer to process in 2019 and 2020, I always received kind and helpful service,” she said. “Everyone’s always been very kind and human. And that’s what I tell people now.”
For a growing number of households weighing $18,500-a-year insurance costs against a healthsharing model built on monthly contributions and direct advocacy, Monroe’s seven years with Liberty HealthShare offer one answer to a question more Americans are now asking on their own.
