Google steers Americans looking for health care into “junk insurance”
I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification: catch me next in Toronto (THURSDAY!), San Diego and Seattle! Full schedule here.
Being "the enshittification guy" means that people expect you to weigh in on every service or platform that has been deliberately worsened to turn a buck. It's an impossible task (and a boring one besides). There's too much of this shit, and it's all so mid – a real "banality of enshittification" situation.
So these days, I really only take note of fractally enshittified things, exponentially enshittified things, omnienshittified things. Things like the fact that Google is sending people searching for health care plans to "junk insurance" that take your money and then pretty much just let you die:
https://pluralistic.net/junk-insurance
"Junk insurance" is a health insurance plan that is designed as a short-term plan that you might use for a couple of days or a week or two, say, if you experience a gap in coverage as you move between two jobs. These plans can exclude coverage for pre-existing conditions and typically exclude niceties like emergency room visits and hospitalization:
Crucially, these plans to not comply with the Affordable Care Act, which requires comprehensive coverage, and bans exclusions for pre-existing conditions. These plans only exist because of loopholes in the ACA, designed for very small-scale employers or temporary coverage.
The one thing junk insurance does not skimp on is sales and marketing. These plans outbid the rest of the market when it comes to buying Google search ads, meaning that anyone who uses Google to research health insurance will be inundated with ads for these shitty plans. The plans also spend a fortune on "search engine optimization" – basically, gaming the Google algorithm – so that the non-ad Google results for health insurance are also saturated with these garbage plans.
The plans also staff up boiler-rooms full of silver-tongued high-pressure sales staff who pick up on the first ring and hard-sell you on their plans, deliberately misleading you into locking into their garbage plans.
That's right, locking in. While Obamacare is nominally a "market based" healthcare system (because Medicare For All would be communism), you are only allowed to change vendors twice per year, during "open enrollment," these narrow biannual windows in which you get to "vote with your wallet" against a plan that has screwed you over and/or endangered your life.
Which means that if a fast-talking salesdroid from a junk insurance company can trick you into signing up for a garbage plan that will leave you bankrupt and/or dead if you have a major health crisis, you are stuck for at least six months in that trap, and won't escape without first handing over thousands of dollars to that scumbag's boss.
Amazingly enough, these aren't even the worst kinds of garbage health plans that you can buy in America: those would be the religious "health share" programs that sleazy evangelical "entrepreneurs" suck their co-religionists into, which cost the world and leave you high and dry when you or your kids get hurt or sick:
The fact that there are multiple kinds of scam health insurance in America, in which companies are legally permitted to take your money and then deny you care (even more than the "non-scam" insurance plans do) shows you the problem with turning health into a market. "Caveat emptor" may make sense when you're buying a used blender at a yard-sale. Apply it to the system that's supposed to take care of you if you're diagnosed with cancer, hit by a bus, or develop eclampsia, and it's a literally fatal system.
This is just one of the ways in which the uniparty is so terrible for Americans. The Republicans want to swap out shitty regulated for-profit health insurance with disastrous unregulated for-profit health insurance, and then give you a couple thousand bucks to yolo on a plan that seems OK to you:
This is like letting Fanduel run your country's health system: everyday people are expected to place fifty-way parlay bets on their health, juggling exclusions, co-pays, deductibles, and network coverage in their head. Bet wrong, and you go bankrupt (if you're lucky), or just die (if you're not).
Democrats, meanwhile, want to maintain the (garbage) status quo (because Medicare for All is communism), and they'll shut down the government to make it clear that they want this. But then they'll capitulate, because they want it, but not that badly.
But like I say, America is an Enshittification Nation, and I don't have time or interest for cataloging mere unienshittificatory aspects of life here. To preserve my sanity and discretionary time, I must limit myself to documenting the omnienshittificatory scams that threaten us for every angle at once.
Which brings me back to Google. Without Google, these junk insurance scams would be confined to the margins. They'd have to resort to pyramid selling, or hand-lettered roadside signs, or undisclosed paid plugs in religious/far-right newsletters.
But because Google has utterly succumbed to enshittification, and because Google has an illegal monopoly – a 90% market share – that it maintains by bribing competitors like Apple to stay out of the search market, junk insurance scams can make bank – and ruin Americans' lives wholesale – by either tricking or paying Google to push junk insurance on unsuspecting searchers.
This isn't merely a case of Google losing the SEO and spam wars to shady operators. As we learned in last year's antitrust case (where Google was convicted of operating an illegal search monopoly), Google deliberately worsened its search results, in order to force you search multiple times (and see multiple screens full of ads) as a way to goose search revenue:
Google didn't just lose that one antitrust case, either. It lost three cases, as three federal judges determined that Google secured and maintains an illegal monopoly that allows it to control the single most important funnel for knowledge and truth for the majority of people on Earth. The company whose mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," now serves slop, ads, spam and scams because its customers have nowhere to go, so why bother spending money making search good (especially when there's money to be made from bad search results)?
Google isn't just too big to fail, it's also too big to jail. One of the judges who found Google guilty of maintaining an illegal monopoly decided not to punish them for it, and to allow them to continue bribing Apple to stay out of the search market, because (I'm not making this up), without that $20b+ annual bribe, Apple might not be able to afford to make cool new iPhone features:
Once a company is too big to fail and too big to jail, it becomes too big to care. Google could prevent slop, spam and scams from overrunning its results (and putting its users lives and fortunes at risk), it just *chooses not to:
Google is the internet's absentee landlord. Anyone who can make a buck by scamming you can either pay Google to help, or trick Google into helping, or – as is the case with junk insurance – both:
America has the world's stupidest health care system, an industry that has grown wildly profitable by charging Americans the highest rates in the rich world, while delivering the worst health outcomes in the rich world, while slashing health workers' pay and eroding their working conditions.
It's omnienshittified, a partnership between the enshittified search giant and the shittiest parts of the totally enshittified health industry.
It's also a reminder of what we stand to gain when we finally smash Google and break it up: disciplining our search industry will make it competitive, regulatable, and force it to side with the public against all kinds of scammers. Junk insurance should be banned, but even if we just end the junk insurance industry's ability to pay the world's only major search engine to help it kill us, that would be a huge step forward.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Summertime and Southern European destinations bring out just about the worst in some people's minds:
This obvious Mommie fan account has been created ten days ago (August 3) and it tells the story of someone working in Antwerp (Belgium, for our friends across the pond) and going 'back home' (Athens, Greece) for the summer holidays:
The picture is very easy to find and looked familiar (not a big fan of Belgium, here, in all honesty) enough:
Same account is very clearly linked to a secondary, private Instagram account:
'Perfection does not belong to this world', the lady writes in her bio.
I am not sure she is trolling. She doesn't sound like, as she shares some very nice pics of the Mount Pelion Riviera (beautiful and totally off the beaten track, that being said).
If I cared, I would gladly tell her this, before disappointment kicks in:
Σας έχουν κοροϊδέψει πολύ, κυρία μου.
Yeah. You've been scammed big time, madam.
How incredibly sad. I bet she doesn't deserve this.
You- you have given me the most horrible idea. Phil is currently addicted to monster hunter, and modeled his character after Mumza. Now you implied in your multiversal shenanigans with Techno Phil and Schlatt that “servers with lore put people in roles.”What if Monster Hunter is Mumza’s once an eon vacation trip to a “server” ( stretching it real far on that definition). She was supposed to be with Philza but there are no blond humans with wings around just a very upset Seikret with green stripes. Sorry Philza the universe took the bird setting slider and just cranked it way up. Worse than playing damsel in a western but at least Mumza is having fun on her trip.
I love this????
Also Mumza is VERY MUCH inferred to be the goddess of Death in Caveat Emptor, so she can probably go to servers outside the standard multiverse. Phil can't, as he is simply the Archangel of Death- a demigod compared to his beloved's god- but Mumza would definitely take him with her.
Call of duty lobby. Is what I'm saying. Fortnite. Anything with a server that can host multiple people would be open to Mumza.
Three years ago we decided to get a new bed frame and headboard. We were both on IG at the time and were both served up ads for a lovely hard wood, platform bed frame by an independent company. We did some research, looked at reviews and decided to buy a frame and matching headboard.
And, it turned out that the guy who designed the bed is a relative of my sister’s husband! My BIL was jazzed when he found we’d bought “his cousin’s bed.”
Fast forward again. Marple was having the zoomies and I was racing around with her. I followed her into our bed and my knee came down on juuust the right spot with juuuuuust the right amount of force to crack the middle vertical slat. Right at the join. In other words, not fixable by us.
We’ve been getting by with a temporary fix and break doesn’t affect integrity of bed too much but also, we’ve only had it for three years — why not see if company can fix or send a new slat?
First I call my BIL — maybe his cousin will know if there’s a fix. Turns out his cousin sold his design and got out of the company. Okay, no big, will call company. Good news: bed frame is under warranty for 12 years. So-so news: they’ll probably replace the entire frame. Maybe bad news? Company was bought by Serta, they no longer make our bed and the other beds on that company’s site are all on clearance. Other possible bad news: frame and headboard are separate pieces. So while we may get a “comparable” frame I don’t think a matching headboard will be included.
Guess we’ll see. And we don’t *have* to replace the frame if it turns out to be something we don’t want.
All of the above to say: probably the last time I buy a significant piece of furniture from an internet company that doesn’t have a brick and mortar store.
Just so everyone knows what kind of freaky ass blog this is, every time I play Fallout: New Vegas I seduce Benny. Sometimes I kill him, sometimes I don't, but every single time I make it a point to have deeply problematic freaky sex with that murderous hunk and I refuse to be ashamed of that fact.
That's the kind of person that's running this blog and thats the kind of content you can expect, so enjoy💖
Thanks to goonhammer throwing me down a rabbit hole, I discovered one of CGL's funnier experiments, the April fools TRO Caveat Emptor. It's free and available on Catalyst's website so I'd recommend going and giving it a read. It's got such wonders as the buster haulermech heavy gauss gun mod that needs to be plugged into the wall to fire, multiple industrialmechs generally stuffed full of tech they shouldn't be (like a Crosscut IIC with a 300 CXXL engine shoved in it), and an inscrutable mechtech named Biff McStrongjaw and his Phoenix Hawk that he stapled an Atlas's worth of armor to at the cost of any possibility of it ever moving (it has a literal top speed of 2 in-game, and it needs improved jump jets to go that fast because otherwise it's actually incapable of walking).
Stuff like this is amazing and I kinda wish other games studios would do it too. I've long maintained bad mechs are the most interesting ludonarrative part of battletech and this just play that to the fucking hilt
