What to Do For Health Insurance When You're Self-Employed? - Jenna Kutcher (2024)

Figuring out insurance as a self-employed couple is really hard and scary. For a long time, Drew kept his 9-5 because we felt like we didn’t really have options that made sense. In fact, we get asked about this a ton! This question has hit my inbox so many times that we created a canned response to answer it. And today, I thought I’d share with all of you what we do for health insurance because Drew and I are both self-employed entrepreneurs.

This can be a stressful part of owning your own business and I’m hoping sharing my experience might help someone else who is in the middle of making this decision. We joined an organization called Christian Healthcare Ministries or CHM this past January and have been really happy. Here are a few things that might be helpful in determining if it could be the right fit for you and help you with your health insurance needs as an entrepreneur.

CHM is a cost-sharing ministry.

What this means is that every month people pay their dues and all of that money goes into a pool to share medical costs. The way CHM sums it up is this: affordable,biblical, andcompassionatefaith-based healthcare cost solution for Christians in all 50 states and around the world.

Recognized under the national healthcare law, CHM isn’t insurance, but is thousands of Christians uniting to share in paying each other’s medical bills. When you go to the doctors office, you claim self-pay and then you submit your bills to CHM after. This means you don’t have an insurance card BUT this also cuts the bills significantly because they aren’t going back and forth between the insurance and the provider.

No “out of network” expenses.

One great blessing is you have more freedom in choosing where you go for care. Since you aren’t covered by a network, you can choose the right facilities and hospitals for you. Along with that, you don’t get things covered like preventative healthcare but we still opt to do a physical and pay out of pocket because it’s truly not that expensive and worth it. Since both of us are very healthy people, we’ve only used CHM for when we had our miscarriage (and surgery) but beyond that we are happy to pay for any preventative care whether that be a physical, chiropractic care, etc.

You “submit” your medical bills, which means as they come in, you submit them into the portal and then once approved they send you a check so you can pay them! For our miscarriage, 100% of our bills were covered by CHM, so we paid out of pocket and then after the 60 day period, they send you a check to compensate for the expenses. It did take a bit of time for everything to get processed and some members will opt to make minimal payments until they receive reimbursem*nt but we just paid out of pocket and then waited for that processing period to replenish our bank account.

It is a ministry.

You DO have to confirm you are living a Christ-centered life and these videos helped explain the system to me. There was a lot of research we did and a lot of questions we asked before joining but since CHM is a not for profit organization, all of your monthly dues are also a write off at the end of the year which is a great benefit for entrepreneurs. If this sounds like it might be a fit to help you with your health insurance needs, here is a referral link that will get you to the top of the application list.

One of the best parts of this ministry is each month we get a letter telling us what our money went towards whether it was Billy’s cancer treatment or to help a new baby in the NICU. To me, this is how we were designed to help one another and I am proud to be a part of something that not only supports our health in our times of need but gives to others when we are well. Whether you go with CHM or not, the most important thing is that you don’t let health insurance be the reason you don’t make the leap to chase your dreams.

Ready to make the leap to working for yourself?

Tune in for more tips on what to do before leaving your 9-5!