Should have mentioned that we will retain ownership of our house in Minnesota which will cause issues with establishing domicile in another state. Read of full time couples from MInnesota being sued by the state since they maintained ties.
The one I know of is
Sanchez v. Commissioner of Revenue, in which the Sanchezes were found to not have shed themselves of their Minnesota domicile.
caselaw.findlaw.com/mn-supreme-court/1385455.html
Thank you. The MNSure plans I found would not actually cover much at all outside of Minnesota. They would at most cover 50% for anything.
Are you getting the 50% figure from plans' out-of-network coverage? If so, how have you determined what a given plan's network is, and whether it is limited to Minnesota?
Holy cow! When I went to the article it never occurred to me it would be Liberty Healthshare -- I'd venture that Liberty is most-recommended healthshare on RV forums. I was assuming the article would be about some marginal player in the field.
Interestingly, there's a company that specializes in insurance for RVers, including health insurance for fulltimers. It used to be run by a guy who had a pretty good reputation for helping people. His website and analysis were indispensable when fulltimers with an Escapees address in Texas were suddenly left without an option for health insurance with a national network when Blue Cross suddenly quit offering any PPO plans in Texas starting in 2016. People were really scrambling.
I'm not particularly impressed with the business/website these days (it's my understanding that it's been bought out), but even back when it was the one-man show by someone who was pretty good about offering information to people, he was recommending (and maybe selling--his website said you could call him to ask questions about it) a healthshare ministry called Aliera. (In 2018, he expressed displeasure with what he called a "liberty-based" healthshare ministry because he had it for three years and in the third year he was having a "horrible time" getting claims paid, which coincides with Liberty's meltdown that the ProPublica article describes.)
Anyway, the Aliera healthshare ministry he was recommending? It went bankrupt, leaving a lot of people with unpaid claims. Here's an article about it:
www.propublica.org/article/liberty-healthshare-healthcare-sharing-ministries-obamacare
It starts with: "Aliera, a now-defunct health care cost-sharing, or 'health share,' company founded by a man who served time in prison for fraud and perjury, has itself been found
guilty of fraud in a federal class action suit."
Here's the website describing and recommending Aliera (an archived version from 2018):
web.archive.org/web/20181128235820/http://www.rverinsurance.com/health-insurance-guide
So we have the frequently recommended Liberty Healthshare having, uh, issues. And Aliera, recommended by someone who specialized in fulltimer health insurance, going bankrupt. So to the OP: maybe Zion is great. And maybe it's great only until it's not great, like Liberty and Aliera. You just never know.
Insurance companies are nothing to crow about, but at least they have regulations they have to abide by, including the amount of their premiums they're required to pay out in claims. Remember, healthshares never have to pay anything--everything they do is voluntary.
They say they have "shared 100% of eligible medical expenses for their members." But note the "eligible." Very clever, because claims aren't eligible unless they say they are. So of course they share 100% of those--if they don't want to share an expense, all they have to do is deem it non-eligible, and they keep their 100% track record. With no outside recourse by the member.
Pretending for a moment that you are just going to retire in your mid-50's but just staying put in MN and not going on the road full time, what were you planning on using for health care in that regard? I'm assuming that neither you nor your wife have health coverage from the jobs you are retiring from.
If the OP were staying put in Minnesota, he'd be getting his health care in Minnesota, and he wouldn't need to be seeking a plan that has a network that extends outside his local area. That's what makes the solutions for "most people" often not apply to people who travel fulltime.
The truth is that in some locations, there simply aren't any ACA plans that provide the nationwide network coverage most fulltimers desire. There are alternatives, such as healthshare ministries or short-term medical plans or indemnity plans, but the marketing on all of them is problematic, resulting all too often in people buying products they don't understand.