Solidarity helps patients and their families find other options to assisted suicide to ease suffering and, Faddis said, expressed a kind of communion in its structure. In a health-share system, members of the organization help to pay each other's healthcare costs. Members are self-pay patients who can see the provider of their choice while Solidarity helps to negotiate a lower rate, which would then be paid by the group of members.
"We're just there to facilitate and to kind of direct them," said Faddis. "The affordability is there because there's no profit in it. We're a non-profit, we're just kind of facilitating that sharing."
"In all ways, we lead our members to the options that are going to respect life, that are going to promote their dignity. We provide care management, we provide services. And we encourage them."
Faddis, who serves as the Catholic health-sharing company's chief operating officer, told CNA that the experience of suffering and death in his own family had formed his commitment to protecting human dignity at the end of life and led to his founding Solidarity. He served as a caregiver for his wife as she was dying of cancer, and experienced first-hand the importance of dignified and respectful hospice and palliative care.
The experiences like his, Faddis said, needed to be shared in the wider battle to resist a culture of death in which suffering has no meaning.
"If we don't tell [an alternative view of suffering], the other side's telling the horror stories of suffering all day long."