Jenna Carlesso discusses this story with Connecticut Public Radio's Lori Mack.
Last March, days after returning home from a family trip to Spain, Paloma Munoz’s 4-year-old son started to cough.
He spiked a fever overnight and began feeling short of breath. Alarmed, Munoz found a hospital with drive-up COVID testing and took her son to get swabbed.
When the results came back negative, she was relieved. Then a bill for $270 arrived in the mail.
“I was just speechless,” she recalled.
Her husband had changed jobs a few months earlier, forcing her family to shop for new health insurance. Unable to afford a policy through their employers or elsewhere, Munoz found an advertisement online for a cheaper, non-traditional type of coverage. For $500 a month, she joined Alliance for Shared Health, a religious health care sharing ministry that pools its members’ premiums to pay out some of their medical bills.