Somewhere around 350 million people live in the United States. Of that number, an estimated 1 million to 1.5 million participate in a healthcare sharing ministry. That gap is something Liberty HealthShare Director of Member Development Mark Pietrow thinks about often.
“Most people haven’t heard of healthsharing,” he said in a 2026 interview. “When you think about 350 million people in the United States, there’s probably a million to a million and a half people who are members of a healthshare..”
Liberty HealthShare has been operating since 1995. It has thousands of members, 155 team members, and has facilitated about $5 billion of sharing in eligible, repriced medical expenses since 2014. For most Americans encountering it for the first time, the reaction is some version of the same question: How have I never heard of this?
Where It Started
The ministry traces its roots to the Gospel Light Mennonite Church Medical Aid Plan, established in 1995 by five families in rural Virginia. The idea was simple and seasoned: members of a faith community voluntarily help one another with eligible medical expenses. It is a practice rooted in the biblical mandate to bear one another’s burdens, described in Galatians 6:2, and it predates health insurance by generations. Amish and Mennonite communities organized structured sharing programs long before the employer-sponsored insurance model became the default way Americans paid for healthcare.
Liberty HealthShare grew out of that tradition. What began as a small congregation’s mutual aid program has become one of the country’s largest and most comprehensive healthcare sharing ministries, serving members across the United States from its Canton, Ohio headquarters. The ministry is a nonprofit 501(c)(3). No shareholders receive distributions. Contributions from members are directed toward sharing eligible medical expenses within the community.
Chief Executive Officer Dorsey Morrow has described the financial philosophy directly: “Our focus is on our members, not on shareholders or next quarter’s profit. We are here to help facilitate sharing between our members. We are not driven by profit. After deducting a small percentage to operate the ministry, the contributions coming in should equal the contributions that go out.”
What a Healthcare Sharing Ministry Actually Is
A healthcare sharing ministry is not an insurance company and does not function like one. Members make voluntary monthly contributions. When a member incurs an eligible medical expense, that expense is submitted to the ministry and, if it meets sharing guidelines, is shared among the community. No legal contract guarantees payment. Participation rests on shared values and mutual commitment among members.
For Liberty HealthShare, those shared values are explicitly Christian. The ministry describes its purpose as shepherding the Christian tradition of healthcare sharing through prayer, education, personal responsibility, and stewardship of the community’s resources. Members are not required to belong to a specific denomination. The ministry’s faith foundation is grounded in general Christian belief rather than any particular church affiliation.
Pietrow said the Christian aspect is one of the things that draws people in once they understand it. “We are a Christian ministry. We’re like-minded. Having those general Christian beliefs brings people together for the good of the community. And that’s really one of our purposes, to share in each other’s eligible burdens.”
Members can see any healthcare provider they choose. Liberty HealthShare encourages its members to utilize providers who participate within the PHCS network, one of the largest provider networks in the country, because PHCS participating providers are more likely to accept fair and reasonable pricing.. Enrollment is available year-round without requiring a qualifying life event.
The Education Problem
Most people who encounter Liberty HealthShare arrive having spent their working lives with employer-sponsored health plans, the default arrangement for American workers since the mid-twentieth century. When a familiar system handles the paperwork automatically, there is little reason to seek out alternatives or research how healthcare sharing actually works. Healthcare sharing ministries have operated in that blind spot for decades.
Pietrow said the first task when speaking with prospective members is always the same. “First and foremost, it’s education around what healthsharing is,” he said. Once people understand how the model works, he added, it tends to make sense. “Once you step people through it and learn, it has a lot of appeal.”
That education happens through conversation, through the ministry’s website at libertyhealthshare.org, through its quarterly member newsletter, and increasingly through word of mouth from existing members. The ministry brought back its Refer-a-Friend program in 2022 for members who want to introduce the ministry to their wider communities.
Morrow has framed the awareness gap as an opportunity. Healthcare sharing has been an available option for three decades. As more people learn how it works, many find it fits circumstances their prior options never addressed well: self-employed workers, small business owners, families who prioritize provider choice over network access, and people for whom the combination of rising premiums and expiring ACA subsidies has made the marketplace increasingly difficult to sustain.
“I think there’s a huge opportunity in education,” Pietrow said, “because as people learn about it, I really believe that’s going to continue to be an opportunity for us.”
