Posts
PURVIEW
★
Out of Our Purview
What a woman dying of cancer, a family that had already run this exact scheme once before, and a state regulator on the record all confirm about the gap Congress left in the law in 2010
Bonnie Martin kept her illness quiet for as long as she could. In October 2018, at a family gathering in Annapolis, Maryland, she began hemorrhaging — a tumor had burst through the wall of her uterus. Doctors performed an emergency hysterectomy. She needed chemotherapy and radiation. She wasn't religious, but she'd joined Liberty HealthShare for her coverage, and found comfort in its pledge to carry one another's burdens.
Treatment pushed her cancer into remission. Eighteen months later it returned, in her lungs. She was dying. Liberty had covered her bills at first. Then, without warning or explanation, the payments stopped. She faced $10,000 in unpaid charges. A lifetime of pristine credit gave way to creditors calling constantly. She forwarded the overdue notices to Liberty, writing across one of them in pen: "WHY HAS THIS NOT BEEN PAID?" Martin died in July 2022, at 63. Liberty never settled the bills she'd spent her last months begging them to pay.
What Martin didn't know was that her money had gone to a family with direct, documented experience in exactly this outcome. Court records identify Daniel J. Beers, the patriarch who later helped build Liberty, as a leading figure in a separate scheme in the 1990s that siphoned tens of millions of dollars from a different health-sharing ministry's members. It wasn't Beers' first time watching a ministry's books get creative, either — the Brotherhood's own board eventually discovered that Hawthorn's newsletter had been concealing payments to an outside vendor, Benevolent Health Systems, in its filings to the IRS.
Liberty ran the same play. Between 2015 and 2021, the ministry paid at least $105 million to Cost Sharing Solutions — a marketing and enrollment firm owned by Beers' sons and a family friend, Brandon Fabris — and at least $35 million more to Medical Cost Solutions, a bill-negotiation firm that passed from Liberty's own CEO to Fabris' father. Comparing Liberty's internal accounting against its public IRS filings from 2017 to 2019, investigators found some of those payments reported instead as direct medical costs paid to members. The concealment method wasn't new. It was inherited.
Fabris was a Liberty official at the same time he helped determine how much Liberty paid his own company. When another executive raised questions about the size of the payments to Cost Sharing Solutions, Beers confronted him and yelled at him for asking, according to a complaint later filed with Ohio fraud investigators. None of this required deception at the level of the individual transaction. It required only that nobody with authority to intervene was positioned to ask.
Liberty is not the only certified ministry regulators have had to act against. Sharity Ministries, once among the industry's largest, filed for bankruptcy and dissolved in 2021 under multi-state investigation for failing to pay members' bills. The Department of Justice separately seized the assets of a small Missouri ministry, Medical Cost Sharing Inc., over allegations of fraud and self-enrichment. None of these organizations share ownership. What they share is the exemption that lets all of them operate the same way.
The $6.5 million Liberty's leadership agreed to pay in 2021 is real money to the members who might eventually see some of it. Set against the $140 million already documented moving to family-controlled vendors, it is roughly 4.6 cents on the dollar — and the family has since fallen behind on paying even that.
Washington State's insurance regulator has taken formal action against health care sharing ministries and still describes its own authority as narrower than most members assume. Consumer complaints against the industry there have piled up specifically because the office that receives them cannot compel a ministry to pay what it owes — a gap built into the exemption itself, not a failure of enforcement.
"They want us to go after the health care sharing ministry, for them to pay their claim. That's out of our purview."
— Michael Marchand, Deputy Commissioner, Washington State Office of the Insurance CommissionerThis post does not argue that every health care sharing ministry operates the way Liberty did, or that Cost Sharing Solutions and Medical Cost Solutions were the only vendors capable of exploiting the gap Congress left open in 2010. The finding across all three parts of this series is simpler, and by now should be unsurprising: a religious exemption built for a bounded, three-century-old community that polices its own was widened, with no verification mechanism attached, for anyone able to file the right paperwork. The people who walked through first were a family whose earlier generation had already run this exact play once, using the same concealment method, on the same kind of victim.
The Amish and Mennonite communities whose name gave this exemption its original legitimacy are not in this story at all, past the first post. That absence is the finding.
This concludes a three-part series. Post I — The Signature — traces the exemption to its origin in a 1965 tax provision built for the Amish. Post II — Two Hundred Words — follows it into a 2010 law that required no verification of who used it. This post is where those two threads converge.
Bonnie Martin's diagnosis, the collapse of Liberty's payments toward her treatment, her handwritten and emailed pleas, and her death in July 2022 are drawn from ProPublica's February 2023 investigation, "How Liberty HealthShare Left Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire," Tier 1, corroborated by its syndicated republication at Cleveland Scene, Talking Points Memo, Salon, and MinistryWatch — treated as one source, not several. The vendor payment figures — at least $105 million to Cost Sharing Solutions and at least $35 million to Medical Cost Solutions between 2015 and 2021, and the concealment of some of those payments in IRS filings from 2017 to 2019 — are drawn from the same investigation's direct comparison of Liberty's internal accounting against its public tax filings. Daniel J. Beers' identification as a leading figure in a distinct 1990s health-sharing ministry fraud, and the Brotherhood's own concealment of payments to Benevolent Health Systems, are drawn from the same investigation's account of the family's history prior to Liberty's founding. The 2021 Ohio Attorney General settlement, the $6.5 million settlement figure, the family's subsequent arrears, the IRS liens against Beers' sons and Brandon Fabris, and the sale of ranch acreage and the family's airline stake are drawn from ProPublica's May and December 2023 follow-up reporting, corroborated by its syndication at HealthLeaders Media and Raw Story. The Sharity Ministries bankruptcy and the Justice Department's seizure of Medical Cost Sharing Inc.'s assets are drawn from the same set of ProPublica investigations. Washington State's complaint data, the $150,000 OneShare fine, and Deputy Commissioner Michael Marchand's on-record statement are drawn from KING 5 Investigators' February 2024 reporting, a separate Tier 1 source.
No comments:
Post a Comment