The average American family with employer-sponsored health insurance spent $6,850 out of their own paycheck on premiums in 2025. That’s before a single doctor visit. Before any prescription. Before the deductible, which for workers at small companies now averages $2,631 for single coverage alone.

That’s the math, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey. Total family premiums reached $26,993 last year, a 6% increase that outpaced both inflation (2.7%) and wage growth (4%). Over the past decade, single-coverage deductibles have climbed 43%.

People are noticing. A growing number of them are looking for something different.

Liberty HealthShare is a Christian healthcare sharing ministry, and its model starts from a completely different premise. Members don’t pay premiums to a corporation. They contribute voluntary monthly shares to a community of like-minded individuals and families, and when another member has an eligible medical expense, those voluntary monthly shares can share into it.

The foundation is the biblical principle of bearing one another’s burdens. The application is practical: members contributemonthly, and the community shares eligible medical expenses that they couldn’t manage alone.

Liberty HealthShare’s published vision is “to build a healthcare sharing community which exemplifies Jesus Christ and empowers like-minded people to manage their healthcare journey.” Its mission is to shepherd that tradition through prayer, education, personal responsibility, and stewardship of shared resources.

That stewardship piece matters. In aninsurance model, the company’s incentive is to collect premiums and pay out as little as possible. In a sharing community, every dollar spent on an overpriced procedure is a dollar that could have helped share a fellow member’s need. The community has a direct stake in keeping costs honest.

How the Cost Controls Actually Work

One of the most concrete expressions of that stewardship is Liberty HealthShare’s fair and reasonable pricing framework. Per the ministry’s Sharing Guidelines, eligible expenses are benchmarked against Medicare reimbursement rates for the same services in the same geographic area. For inpatient or outpatient facility expenses, that’s 140% of the Medicare allowable amount. For physician and ancillary services, it’s 120%.

Members are encouraged to use HST Connect, a powerful provider search tool, to find providers participating in the PHCS Network who are more likely to accept those rates. Choosing a PHCS Network participating provider upfront reduces the likelihood of a balance bill that falls outside sharing eligibility.

Liberty HealthShare publishes educational resources and member communications specifically to help people make more informed decisions about where and how they seek care. An informed member, the ministry’s philosophy goes, makes decisions that serve the entire community’s resources, not just their own.

For members who need imaging or surgery services, the ministry partners with Valenz Health and Coral to offer bundled pricing access. Members contact the Liberty HealthShare Care Navigation team before scheduling an MRI, CT scan, or surgical procedure, and the team connects them with the appropriate vendor to find a high-quality provider at a pre-negotiated rate. No surprise bills. No large upfront deposits. Price clarity before anyone sets foot in a facility.

The Membership Programs Built for Real Life

Liberty HealthShare offers six medical cost-sharing programs designed for different circumstances. Liberty Unitecarries a suggested monthly share amount starting at $261. It offers up to $1,000,000 per incident of fair and reasonable eligible medical expenses available for sharing after the Annual Unshared Amount is met, with no co-share requirement.

For context: the average worker’s monthly contribution toward employer-sponsored family insurance in 2025 was $571. Many smaller employers contribute far less, leaving their workers to shoulder the remainder.

For the self-employed, the gig worker, the small business owner, or anyone whose employer-sponsored plan does little against a $10,000 hospital bill, the math behind a healthsharing program looks different.

15 Consecutive Months of Membership Growth

Chief Executive Officer Dorsey Morrow noted in the Q1 2026 Member Quarterly that Liberty HealthShare has seen 15 consecutive months of increased new memberships compared to the same month a year prior. He did not attribute that to any single factor. He thanked the staff and the members.

The broader context is hard to ignore. When health insurance coverage costs $27,000 a year for a family, and tens of millions of people are skipping prescriptions or deferring retirement to pay their medical bills, questions about other options become more urgent. Liberty HealthShare’s healthcare sharing model, rooted in a Christian tradition of mutual aid, is one such option. More information is available at libertyhealthshare.org.