Why SMI? Scott Brown found sanity in health care sharing

What Scott Brown found in Samaritan Ministries’ approach to providing for health care needs was sanity.

Before the director of the National Center for Family-Integrated Churches and his family joined Samaritan in January 2012, Scott was becoming frustrated with the health care options they had, as well as “the abuses that take place through health insurance policies.”

“They breed lots of waste,” he says. “One of the things I love about Samaritan is it brings sanity back to health care. Instead of rushing off and having whatever procedure done, you actually pray about it first. You actually consider whether you should just get in your car and spend resources for something you’re going to recover from anyway. It makes you cry out to the Lord first and reach for the medicine cabinet if necessary. It brings a whole new level of sanity and discernment and dependence upon God to the whole proposition of health care.”

But there was one other reason he likes Samaritan.

“It’s a lot cheaper, too.”

All six staffers at the NCFIC are members of Samaritan Ministries, as well as all of Scott’s immediate family members. He and his wife, Deborah, have four children, nine grandchildren and another grandchild “on the way.” Scott says, “One of my infant grandsons almost died this year from whooping cough, but recovered, thank God, after a week’s stay in the hospital.

“But I was so grateful for Samaritan’s members,” Scott says.

A week in a hospital is expensive, he noted, but his son, David, was able to negotiate the cost down, which Scott calls another example of restoring sanity to health care.

“In the current health care environment, we have been conditioned to not pay attention to the costs,” he says. “You actually get down to right cost structure when you have to deal with the dollars yourself and then think about asking other people to help you pay. You start thinking, ‘I need to be careful and prayerful and frugal, and I need to be part of the solution.’”