Yeah, but I kind of see the other side of this.
This is insurance. Except they may not have the same legal obligation to cover your bills as real insurance normally does.
And while Medi-Share has been around for a while and seems to be a good company, whose to say that fly by night operations won’t start emulating them.
Insurance companies that would promise the moon but never pay is why they started regulating insurance in the first place.
If you allow companies to say, I’m not real insurance because I don’t collect all the premiums directly, then how do you prevent a return to all the problems that we regulated insurance for in the first place?
Now I’m not saying all insurance regulations are in the people’s interests. Clearly insurance companies use regulations to their interests too. But it sure is nice to be able to call an insurance commissioner when a large insurance is trying to welch on a promise, instead of having to hire a lawyer each time.
It’s like food coops. After a while the grocers realize business is going that direction, so they start complaining. The difference is that grocers don’t have their own government agency to crack down on their competition.
As with all combined efforts, someone will occasionally gum up the works and they’ll have to make rules to cover that.
That’s the argument for every nanny state regulation, that people without them won’t be able to look out for themselves.