The Healthcare Shift: Why Faith-Based Organizations Need a New Model

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The Anxiety of Renewal Season

For most churches, nonprofits, and employees, annual health insurance renewals come with one immediate emotion: Anxiety.

You open that renewal letter and brace yourself, hoping this year’s increase won’t break your budget or force your employees to choose between coverage or no coverage. But what if your premiums could actually stay consistent year after year?

Welcome to the reality of financial stewardship at Stoneford, where we take the complexity out of the system to help faith-based organizations find strength and stability in healthcare.

The Traditional System is Broken

When it comes to health insurance in particular, we know that the traditional methodology is fundamentally broken.

• Rising and Unpredictable Costs: Premiums are soaring—10%, 25%, 30%, even 90% increases are not uncommon. Renewal season feels like a game of financial roulette.
• No Real Strategy: Everyone is stuck. Costs become unaffordable, not just the premiums, but also the care and the medicine itself.
• Mission Strain: For smaller ministries, that unpredictability makes it nearly impossible to plan, grow, or care for your staff in the way you want to.

The current system isn’t built for you. It’s built for profit, and that profit increasingly strains your resources and threatens your mission.

The Takeaway: Is Your Healthcare Serving or Straining Your Mission?

I’m Casey Hayden, founder of Stoneford, and I’ve spent several years helping churches and nonprofits navigate benefits, budgets, and long-term planning. Over and over, I’ve seen organizations struggle with the same thing: unpredictable costs that feel totally out of their control.

It’s not that leaders don’t care about their people; it’s that the traditional carrier system is simply not built to serve the unique financial needs of ministry organizations.

So, here’s your crucial takeaway for today: I want you to look at how your organization approaches healthcare. Is it serving your mission, or is it straining it?

If it’s the latter, it is time to explore a new model.

The Solution: Stability, Savings, and Peace of Mind

We created the Cedar Health Alliance to be that new model—a stable, sustainable, and affordable healthcare plan built specifically for faith-based organizations.

By leveraging the collective scale of our partner network and utilizing a transparent, Level-Funded structure, the Alliance helps organizations navigate their benefits for the ultimate purpose of stability, savings, and peace of mind.

The cost of inaction on healthcare is simply too high. Sustainability is not a hope, it’s an action plan.

To see exactly how the Cedar Health Alliance can stabilize your budget and maximize your employee enrollment, visit cedarhealthalliance.com today. Get your quotes or get started right now.