Liberty HealthShare has recorded 22 consecutive months of year-over-year enrollment growth as of June 2026, extending a turnaround that began after a multiyear dip in new memberships.
Keith Price, Liberty HealthShare communications manager, told MinistryWatch, an independent publication that tracks the finances of Christian nonprofits, that revenue had been tapering off since 2021, when Congress made Affordable Care Act premium tax credits more generous and pulled some prospective members toward subsidized marketplace plans instead of healthsharing. Price told MinistryWatch in February that the ministry had already logged 14 straight months of growth at that point and expected the trend to continue through 2026.
Liberty HealthShare says the recent gains have not been confined to any single region. Director of Member Development Mark Pietrow, who spends much of his time introducing prospective members to a concept many have never encountered, points to a mix of larger and mid-sized markets when he talks about where interest has been building, including Florida, California, Texas, Ohio, Indiana, and pockets of the Northeast.
Pietrow’s read on the ministry’s growth potential centers on a gap between how many Americans could benefit from healthsharing and how many have heard of it. “Most people haven’t heard of healthsharing,” he said in a 2026 interview. “When you think about 350 million people in the United States, there’s probably a million to a million and a half people who are members of a healthshare.” He sees that gap narrowing. “I think there’s a huge opportunity in education,” Pietrow said, “because as people learn about it, I really believe that’s going to continue to be an opportunity for us.”
The clearest outside force behind the renewed growth is the lapse of enhanced ACA premium tax credits, which expired Dec. 31, 2025 after Congress declined to extend them. The Urban Institute projects that 4.8 million Americans will lose health insurance as a result, a 21% increase in the country’s uninsured population, with another 7.3 million dropping marketplace plans altogether, according to an analysis the nonpartisan research group published in September 2025.
Among enrollees who no longer qualify for any federal help at all, more than 1.5 million people are now absorbing the full 2026 premium increase out of pocket, according to a 50-state analysis by MoneyGeek.
For enrollees who still receive a reduced tax credit, the average monthly payment is projected to more than double in 2026, to $1,904 from $888, according to KFF’s premium tax credit calculator.
Florida illustrates the exposure. The state had roughly 4.7 million people enrolled in ACA marketplace plans in 2025, more than any other state, and 24% of its enrollees under 65 relied on the enhanced credits, compared with 8% nationally, according to a PolitiFact analysis published by NBC 6 South Florida. Florida never expanded Medicaid, so the marketplace has become the primary path to health insurance coverage for lower-income residents who are self-employed or work for small businesses. “Florida would definitely be the top, or tied as the top state affected by these cuts,” Cynthia Cox, vice president of the ACA program at KFF, told PolitiFact.
Texas, which also declined to expand Medicaid, is projected to see the largest absolute increase in newly uninsured residents of any state, a 39% rise, and carries more than 100,000 unsubsidized marketplace enrollees who are absorbing an average increase of roughly $2,412 a year with no state cushion. California holds the largest unsubsidized population in raw numbers, more than 201,000 people, despite operating its own backfill program. Ohio and Indiana rank further down the list of dollar increases but still carry tens of thousands of unsubsidized enrollees apiece.
The population absorbing those increases, largely self-employed workers, early retirees, and small-business owners who no longer qualify for a subsidy overlaps closely with the audience Liberty HealthShare, which is not health insurance, has built its programs to serve.
In the Northeast, the picture is more mixed. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey each created their own subsidy backfills for 2026, softening the blow for marketplace enrollees below certain income thresholds, according to MoneyGeek’s state-by-state analysis. But the backfills stop at those cutoffs, and thousands of enrollees above them in those same states are still absorbing premium increases of $850 to more than $2,300 a year with no assistance at all.
Liberty HealthShare has facilitated the sharing of nearly $5 billion in eligible, repriced medical expenses since 2014, the year the federal government recognized it as an exempt healthcare sharing ministry under the Affordable Care Act, according to MinistryWatch. Its expansion since then has included new programs aimed at young adults and Medicare-eligible seniors, along with dental and vision sharing program options added in the past two years.
Chief Executive Officer Dorsey Morrow has framed the ministry’s recent cost reductions, including a 16% average cut to family contributions in three of its six programs and the return of more than $2 million to members in May, as evidence that a nonprofit sharing model can move in the opposite direction from rising health insurance premiums. “Our members have been great consumers of healthcare, and we have been extraordinary stewards of their monthly sharing contributions,” Morrow said. “Our ability to do this is evidence that healthsharing works and enables our members to better handle their healthcare expenses.”
Suggested monthly amounts across the ministry’s six sharing programs still range from $87 to $369 for individuals, with family options starting at $319, a gap from the marketplace’s unsubsidized reality that Pietrow expects more Americans to notice in the months ahead. Whether that translates into sustained growth across the states he named will depend on how many of the newly uninsured go looking for an alternative to managing their healthcare expenses before their next medical bill arrives.
