Liberty HealthShare has recorded 20 consecutive months of year-over-year enrollment growth, and enrollment during the most recent open enrollment period more than doubled compared with the year before, according to Chief Executive Officer Dorsey Morrow.
Morrow shared those figures during an appearance on the Becker’s Healthcare Podcast, in an episode titled “Community Over Coverage: Why More Americans Are Opting Out of Health Insurance.” Hosted by Becker’s Healthcare’s Brian Zimmerman, the conversation focused on why households are reconsidering how they pay for medical care. Liberty HealthShare is a nonprofit healthsharing ministry that facilitates voluntary medical cost sharing among members with shared Christian values, and it is one of several such ministries that have reported rising enrollment in recent years.
Morrow pointed to cost as the starting point for most conversations with prospective members. “People are clearly paying high premiums now,” he said. “And that’s before you even talk about deductibles and the out-of-pocket costs before the coverage kicks in.”
The Premiums Driving the Search
The math behind that frustration is measurable. The average cost of employer-sponsored health insurance reached $17,496 per employee in 2025, a 6 percent jump that outran both inflation and wage growth, according to Mercer’s 2025 National Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans. Mercer expects total health benefit costs to rise another 6.7 percent in 2026, pushing the average above $18,500 per employee.
Employees in large-employer PPO plans pay an average monthly premium contribution of $191 for individual coverage on top of an average deductible of $1,064. Employees who instead choose a high-deductible health savings account plan pay less upfront, an average of $109 a month, but take on a higher deductible, $2,481 on average, before the plan pays anything.
People buying coverage on their own face a comparable squeeze. Insurers on ACA exchanges raised premiums by an estimated 26 percent for 2026, and most enrollees faced even sharper increases in what they pay when enhanced federal subsidies expired, according to KFF. Those pressures, taken together, form the backdrop Morrow referenced when he described consumers wanting greater transparency, flexibility, and control over their healthcare spending.
What Members Get Instead of a Contract
Health insurance is a regulated financial product: insurers collect premiums and are contractually obligated to pay covered claims, subject to state oversight. Healthsharing works differently for the Liberty HealthShare community. Members contribute a suggested monthly share amount, and the ministry facilitates the voluntary sharing of other members’ eligible medical expenses according to published Sharing Guidelines. No member is compelled to contribute toward another’s bill, and sharing isn’t a guaranteed payment the way an insurance claim is.
Liberty HealthShare offers six healthsharing programs, with monthly amounts starting at $89 for members 35 and younger. Enrollment is available year-round, without the special qualifying life events that health insurance marketplaces typically require outside of the annual open enrollment period. Members who want to switch between Liberty HealthShare’s own programs, by contrast, can do so during an annual renewal window that opens 60 days before their renewal date each year.
Prevention Over Treatment
Morrow said the more durable answer to rising costs isn’t a better plan design. It’s avoiding the medical event in the first place. “The most affordable healthcare event is the one that never happens,” he said. “Preventing a heart attack is just way better for everybody and less expensive than treating one.”
That outlook frames how Liberty HealthShare talks about member service more broadly. Morrow described transparency as a baseline expectation regardless of which model a person chooses. “Transparency is critical,” he said. “I think we all need to expect that from whatever model we are utilizing.”
A Sector Under More Scrutiny
The growth Morrow described has drawn more outside attention to how individual healthsharing ministries operate, not less. Liberty HealthShare has earned Candid’s Gold Seal for Transparency for five consecutive years, a four-star rating from Charity Navigator, an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau, and the highest efficiency rating MinistryWatch awards among the healthsharing ministries it tracks. Member surveys cited by the ministry show an 80 percent approval rating, and the ministry holds a 4.5-star rating on both Google and Trustpilot.
Rebecca and William Monroe, early retirees who joined Liberty HealthShare in 2018 after a year of paying $1,500 a month for health insurance with a $15,000 deductible, are among the members whose experience the ministry points to when it describes that growth. Their reasons track closely with what Morrow described on the podcast: a monthly cost they could plan around, and a provider network they could navigate without a middleman standing between them and a bill.
None of those ratings change the basic tradeoff a household weighs when it drops health insurance for healthsharing: lower, more predictable monthly costs and more control over provider choice, against the absence of a contractual guarantee that a given bill will be paid. For a growing number of Americans watching premiums outpace their paychecks, that trade-off looks more favorable than it did even a few years ago.
