Longtime counsel Brian Heller stepping back after two decades

Samaritan attorney has been responsible for crafting many legal safeguards for health care sharing ministries during his tenure

Samaritan Ministries attorney Brian Heller is stepping back but not stepping away.

The ministry’s lead counsel for more than 20 years, Brian has helped Samaritan with technical matters like contracts and corporate details. His most enduring and highest-impact work, however, has been to keep the health care sharing ministry on firm regulatory ground and protect it from government encroachment.

As he approaches retirement, Brian is handing over much of the compliance and contract work to the newly arrived Paul Owen, based in Texas.

For now, Brian will continue to oversee ongoing litigation and legal strategies aimed at protecting health care sharing members. That will be done both as legal counsel for Samaritan and alongside the Alliance for Health Care Sharing Ministries.

“Those things can keep me busy enough to hopefully just be semi-retired for a while,” he said.

In the beginning

Brian was one of the first people Samaritan founder Ted Pittenger turned to when Ted was getting Samaritan set up. After meeting with Brian in July 1991, Ted had solid direction on organizing Samaritan as a nonprofit corporation.

And, as Ted recalled, when he explained the uncommon concept of health care sharing to Brian, “He didn’t look at me like I was an idiot.”

Brian was first licensed to practice law in 1981 and went to work for the Illinois Appellate Court. In 1986, he moved back to his hometown of Washington, Illinois, starting a practice out of his grandparents’ basement and opening his own office in 1987.

When Samaritan and its original legal counsel parted ways in the early 2000s, Brian was retained, and ministry matters became about three-fourths of his practice. He handled all aspects of Samaritan’s legal needs for several years. Attorneys Paul Brodersen and Daniel Coughlin were later hired to assist with contracts, compliance issues, employment matters, real estate, and intellectual property.

Clear Guidelines help

Brian has been instrumental in keeping Samaritan’s Guidelines precise and clear and has guided the ministry in communicating them to members as well as public officials. That guidance has helped to avoid confusion and trouble and make the life of Public Policy Director Joel Noble easier.

“We have been able to say for 30 years that, to our knowledge, no member of Samaritan Ministries has ever made a complaint to a department of insurance, any regulatory agency, or any consumer advocacy group in any state,” Joel said. “This is foremost because of God’s grace and providence, but it is also because of the wisdom and counsel of Brian Heller.

“Whether it be the Guidelines, marketing material, or testimony before elected officials, Brian’s foresight, along with a cautious approach and carefully chosen language, has allowed us to protect our members’ ability to continue to care for one another’s medical expenses along with providing emotional and spiritual support to one another.”

Brian was also instrumental in drafting language for an exemption for members of health care sharing ministries to the requirement to purchase health insurance enacted by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. He patterned it after legislative language already used to exempt the Amish from being involved in Social Security.

It ended up almost verbatim in the law.

Another area of expertise needed as Samaritan has developed is in digital sharing and electronic transfers of money between members “because issues even as simple as how we empower our members to use PayPal to send Shares starts getting us involved in banking and money transfer laws,” Brian said.

Recent years have also seen an increase in privacy laws, an important area for members of a ministry dealing in individuals’ health records.

“It’s gone way beyond just being concerned about departments of insurance as far as what are risky legal issues that we have to be aware of, and we have to be preparing for and setting up compliance and internal regulations on how we’re dealing with that,” Brian said.

Workings of God

Brian doesn’t like to call the many positives that have happened on his watch “accomplishments.” Instead, they were the workings of God that he was allowed to be involved in.

“Maybe I had some role,” he said.

As Joel Noble mentioned, the No. 1 victory is that no member has ever complained to a government agency about Samaritan.

“I was telling that to a lawyer a couple months ago, and he said, ‘Well, you definitely could not be an insurance company!’” Brian said, adding, “And that’s true!”

He praised members and Member Advocates at Samaritan for that being the case.

“Even when members may disagree with decisions or they’re disappointed, they have enough collegiality and Christian spirit that their reaction is not to go run to the government because of some disappointment,” he said. “But I think part of that is we’ve created expectations in the Guidelines and our marketing, as well as internal communication so that our staff understands how they need to communicate with the members.”

So much so that one of the first things prospective members are told, as well as new staff members, is that “We’re not insurance.”

Another blessing, he said, is “being able to operate without limitation in all 50 states.”

“That is by no means my personal accomplishment,” Brian said. “I’ve just more or less been along for the ride, being involved with our Public Policy department from day one and being part of the strategy working with the Alliance members.”

Flowing through Legal

Much of what Brian has done has made it possible for others at Samaritan to focus on serving fellow members and staffers rather than fretting about legal matters.

“A recent overview concluded that virtually all the decision-making (in the ministry) was flowing through the Legal department,” Brian said. “I wouldn’t call it by design as such. It was more of necessity as we live in a very tentative legal environment where it’s not absolutely clear that we have a constitutional right to

do what we do. Some state could say, ‘What you’re doing is illegal because you have to comply with our insurance code.’ Of course, we cannot (comply with an insurance code). And so everything has

been filtered through me, from Guidelines to marketing to member communications.”

He'll still be around

As Brian winds down his career, he’ll continue to handle some business through his practice and be available to his successor at Samaritan. Beyond that, he’ll spend time with his wife, Pati, and watch the growing legal career of his son, Joshua, who recently passed the bar and now serves as a judge advocate in the U.S. Marines.

And Brian will be around to provide wisdom and insight to Samaritan leadership, just like he’s done for decades.