Tim Greeson spent more than 25 years working as a freelance technical director and event manager in New York City, a career that never came with a corporate benefits package. When he discovered Liberty HealthShare, which is not health insurance, in 2017, he approached it with caution. “It was something I never heard of before,” he said. “I was like, well, let me try it because I don’t want to keep spending the kind of money I was on insurance. I’m staying healthy and this insurance just keeps going up. I needed to try something different.”
The test of that decision came fast. A kidney stone sent Greeson to a Manhattan emergency room, where doctors ran a CT scan and spent hours debating whether surgery was necessary. It wasn’t. The bill came to about $11,000. Greeson paid his $1,000 Annual Unshared Amount, and Liberty HealthShare members shared the rest. “That’s when I realized, OK, this is cool,” he said. “It’s a really good situation.”
Greeson belongs to a workforce that has expanded well ahead of the systems built to insure it. More than 64 million Americans freelanced in some capacity in 2025, according to Upwork’s annual Freelance Forward survey. Only 40% of gig workers report access to health insurance, compared with 82% of full-time employees, and independent contractors are roughly 35% less likely than salaried workers to carry employer-sponsored insurance, according to data compiled by HSA for America. The gaps in dental and short-term disability coverage run even wider: 25% of gig workers have dental coverage versus 66% of full-time employees, and 5% have short-term disability insurance versus 42%.
The marketplace has become something of a fallback for that population by default rather than design. Roughly half of adults with ACA marketplace coverage are small-business owners, employees of small businesses, or self-employed, according to KFF, a health policy research organization, meaning the exchange increasingly functions as the country’s default insurance option for people the employer-based system was never built around.
For workers whose income fluctuates month to month, marketplace premiums calculated on projected annual earnings can be harder to budget around than a fixed monthly contribution.
Several features of Liberty HealthShare’s design speak directly to that gap. Members choose their own doctors; the ministry does not require a referral to see a specialist or restrict members to an in-network list before agreeing to share a bill. Liberty HealthShare does maintain a relationship with the Private Healthcare Systems network, which lists more than 900,000 participating providers nationwide, and members who select a PHCS provider reduce their odds of a balance bill, since those providers are more likely to accept fair and reasonable pricing. A member who prefers a doctor outside that network keeps the freedom to see them anyway.
That freedom extends to how eligible bills move through the system. When a provider does not submit a bill to Liberty HealthShare electronically, members can submit the expense themselves through ShareBox, the ministry’s online portal, within 180 days of the date of service, attaching an itemized bill with diagnosis and procedure codes. Members who receive a balance bill from a provider that did submit electronically can send it to the HST Connect Patient Advocacy Center, which negotiates on the member’s behalf. Neither path depends on an employer’s human resources office or an insurance company’s prior authorization desk, the kind of intermediary a freelancer or gig worker does not have. (libertyhealthshare.org/faq)
Liberty HealthShare has taken note of who is asking these questions. The ministry’s LinkedIn page describes itself as “the place to go if you are a small business owner, solo-entrepreneur, or gig-worker,” adding, “We know you have specific questions and needs. You can find the answers here.” (linkedin.com/company/liberty-healthshare) Six sharing programs are priced with that audience in mind: suggested monthly amounts for individuals range from $87 to $369, with family options starting at $319, well under the $26,993 that employers and workers together paid on average for a family health plan in 2025, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Employer Health Benefits Survey. A one-time $135 application fee applies at enrollment.
The self-employed have occupied this gap for decades. Employer-sponsored insurance became the default way most Americans obtained health coverage after World War II, when wage controls pushed companies to compete for workers with added compensation instead of higher pay. That arrangement left independent contractors, sole proprietors, and part-time workers to buy coverage individually, typically at a higher per-person cost than employers pay for group plans, and small businesses that want to offer a group plan often cannot absorb the expense, according to research published by the National Federation of Independent Business.
A federal tax deduction created in the 1990s let self-employed workers write off some of their premium costs, but it did not change the underlying math: a sole proprietor still pays the full premium, with no employer contribution to offset it.
Greeson eventually left Liberty HealthShare during the pandemic, when New York’s meeting industry shut down, and Medicaid became his only option. He returned once he turned 65 and enrolled in Liberty Assist, the ministry’s program for members with Medicare Parts A and B. Looking back on the community that carried him through more than two decades of freelance work, he sums it up simply. “Nobody is making money off this. It’s just a supportive community,” Greeson said. “I promised to live a certain kind of lifestyle, no smoking and staying as healthy as possible. It feels very Christian to me, and that’s a good thing.”
