Trump’s Junk Insurance Is a Windfall for Scammy Insurance Companies

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Back in 2017 Republicans did their level best to destroy Obamacare. They failed, and in a final act of pique Donald Trump issued an executive order related to junk insurance plans. These were bare-bones plans limited to three months and meant as a short bridge for emergencies. Trump’s order allowed them to last as long as 12 months and be renewed up to a total of 36 months. In other words, these effectively became viable insurance plans for many people.

The idea, of course, is that they would be marketed at young people who were healthy and didn’t expect to have much in the way of medical bills. But guess what? The shysters and scammers didn’t care what the wonks thought. Instead, they started marketing junk policies to precisely the people least suited for it: the elderly. “There is much low-hanging fruit in the over-65 space,” the CEO of Health Insurance Innovations told Wall Street analysts.

This all comes from a Bloomberg story which I would quote at more length, but I am paywalled out. Sorry. However, I can pass this along:

That’s right. Bullshit artists, who know that gramma and grampa are the “low-hanging fruit” of robocalling for scammy products, have eagerly taken to the phones to sell them Trump’s junk insurance. How eagerly? 387 million calls in a single month. Nice work, Donald. And all so you can say you owned Barack Obama.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate