When a New York couple purchased a health insurance plan from a telemarketer, they thought it covered everything they wanted: doctor visits, tests, and medicine. But then came the unexpected bills for thousands of dollars, forcing them to skip crucial medical care.
In their series “Health Care Hustlers,” Bloomberg reporters Zachary Mider and Zeke Faux revealed how this couple and thousands of other people signed up for health plans by unknowingly agreeing to work fake “jobs.”
Mider and Faux join “An Arm and a Leg” host Dan Weissmann to peel back the surprising layers of this story, from a TV-sitcom-writer-turned-investor who masterminded the idea to the legal gray area that allows these plans to proliferate.
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Transcript: A Wild Health Insurance Hustle
Note: “An Arm and a Leg” uses speech-recognition software to generate transcripts, which may contain errors. Please use the transcript as a tool but check the corresponding audio before quoting the podcast.
Dan: Hey there—
This story’s outline may sound familiar, but what’s underneath — what we unravel here: It’s a new kind of thing. And it’s weird.
And it could become huge.
So: A couple from New York, Sarah and Joe Strohmenger started new businesses, so they needed to buy their own health insurance for the first time..
And Sarah says the New York state marketplace, with Obamacare plans, seemed a little risky: If they got a subsidy, and then their new businesses did well, they might have to pay that subsidy back.
Sarah Strohmenger: As new business owners, we had not a clue of how much we were gonna make in the year.
So we were nervous about. How much we were gonna have to back pay.
Dan: Looking elsewhere seemed like a cautious thing to do. Google led them to a site that offered quotes for insurance policies — just e …