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2008-08-19 issue:

Focus groups want health-care access

Proposed plan for health-care access for all pastors goes to Executive Board.

by Gordon Houser

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Delegates at San José 2007 gave the go-ahead for Mennonite Church USA to develop a plan that could provide health insurance for all pastors and church workers in the denomination’s congregations. Now that plan has been tested with focus groups and will be presented to the Executive Board later this month for approval to proceed.

Following that delegate action, Keith Harder, director of the Health Care Access Project, and a project team formulated a vision and some details for how it could work. From March to August, the project team met with 27 focus groups. These consisted of 250 people from 147 congregations and represented all but four of the 21 area conferences. The team also made presentations at the African-American Mennonite Association in Elkhart, Ind., a Hispanic council in Lancaster, Pa., and Hispanic pastors in Dallas, Texas, and Oregon.

Harder says there are 80-100 Mennonite Church USA pastors (out of 1,200 who are 64 or younger) with no health insurance. Others are underinsured. Others are insured but have preexisting conditions and may not be able to get health insurance if they change insurers.

“Portability is a big issue,” Harder says. The project team knows of congregations that wanted to call a pastor, but that pastor had preexisting conditions and would not be covered under a health plan available to that congregation.

In the proposed plan, such preexisting conditions are not a factor; everyone is accepted in the plan who is credentialed and works (not necessarily is paid) 20 hours a week for the church.

Harder says he was pleased by the strong desire in these focus groups to respond to those who are uninsured. He was also surprised that cost was not as big an issue as he had expected. To aid in this, the team asked congregations participating in a focus group to submit information about the congregation and what they were paying for health insurance. Some said it was no more than what they were already paying. For others the cost would be greater.

The costs for the plan have three components:
(1) the insurance itself;
(2) mutual aid (guaranteed insurability) and
(3) access (the mission or justice component).

The mutual aid component helps those congregations with pastors who have preexisting conditions. The third component helps provide health insurance for those who now do not have it. This can be seen as a matter of justice and as strengthening the witness of Mennonite Church USA and lends greater integrity to efforts to influence the U.S. government in making health care more accessible to everyone.

What might this look like practically? Take, for example, a congregation of 100 regular attenders with one full-time pastor who has health insurance through her spouse. In this plan, that congregation would pay into the plan a fee of $2,300 (for the one pastor; double that for two pastors) plus $1,000 ($10 per regular attender). This money would help provide for those who have preexisting conditions and subsidize congregations that cannot afford health insurance for their pastors.

The congregation would receive benefits as well, including long-term disability coverage. It also protects the congregation if it should want to hire a pastor later who has preexisting conditions.

One of the responses to this idea of helping other congregations in this way is that it may detract from other mission giving.

Harder acknowledges this may happen, but this plan also helps tie churches together. It also increases our integrity and strengthens our witness to the larger society. It has more integrity to call on the government to make health care accessible to all if the church is doing that with its workers.

As a result of responses from the focus groups, the project team has made some adjustments to their plan. They’ve incorporated an emphasis on wellness and will provide financial incentives, such as knowing one’s body mass index and blood pressure and improving those. They’ve also raised the lifetime maximum.

“In the big picture,” says Harder, “we concluded that it would be better to develop a new, churchwide health plan rather than just raise money for those without insurance.” This plan has the potential to create a greater sense of interdependence, he says. “Such a plan, where we work together to care for one another ... will be much more sustainable over time.”—Gordon Houser

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  • Posted by wltyson at Monday, August 25, 2008 at 04:51 PM

    Thank you for this update. As stated, those congregations in the focus group meetings I attended seemed inclined to support this initiative. I trust congregations and their leaders see the possibilities this plan offers extending care to one another. This is a start of addressing unequal access for all our members both in local communinities as well as on a national scale. I believe the "access" fee example for a congregation of 100 regular attendees as stated in this article should be $1,000, not $100 since the fee is stated as $10 a regular attendee. Warren Tyson, Brownstown, Pa., Atlantic Coast executive conference minister and Eastern District conference minister

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Rate your readiness to advocate for your congregation’s participation in this plan (from 1=would not advocate to 6=would advocate).

Percentage ranked 4, 5 or 6: 84.1
Percentage ranked 5 or 6: 55.1

Rate your congregation’s likelihood of participation in this plan (from 1=would not participate to 6=would participate).

Percentage ranked 4, 5 or 6: 84.1
Percentage ranked 5 or 6: 55.1

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