Health Payer Specialist | February 6, 2023
Since the company takes pains to state members are ultimately responsible for their own bills, stressing that it is not a health insurer, it positions itself as exempt from state and federal regulation. Zachary Baron, associate director of the O’Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, notes that means its members will not have many basic protection, such as guaranteed coverage despite pre-existing conditions, and assurance that their bills will be covered. Regulation also puts constraints on how much payers must spend on medical care, and restrictions on profit. In recent years, religious organizations, or ones claiming to be that, have tried that approach, but that hasn’t always worked.