Health care scams kick into high gear
by digby
What the California Republicans are doing with Obamacare is probably the lowest of the low, but they aren’t the only ones trying to scam citizens. I just got a robo-call from someone telling me that “the records” show that under the new health care laws I will qualify for low cost insurance and should cive them all my personal information in order to “verify.” Needless to say, it’s a con. Apparently, there are a lot of them:
Buses running up and down the streets of San Francisco are plastered with ads for Covered California, the state’s official health insurance exchange. But a passenger who goes home and visits coveredcalifornia.com on Thursday would be greeted with a blank white page—not because of any website glitches, but because it is one of ten imitation sites that has been shut down by the California Attorney General’s office.
“These websites fraudulently imitated Covered California in order to lure consumers away from plans that provide the benefits of the Affordable Care Act,” state Attorney General Kamala Harris said in a statement. “My office will continue to investigate and shut down these kinds of sites.”
Officials from Washington to New Hampshire have been dealing with websites that closely resemble government portals. The Kentucky Attorney General has sent cease and desist letters to similar mimicker websites, and Pennsylvania officials shut down a private “exchange” site brandishing the state’s seal this summer.
These are mostly insurance brokers trying to get uninformed people to buy the crappy insurance they’re offering outside the exchanges. And the sites look authentic:
I wonder how many marks they’ve found.