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

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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.

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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