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Google steers Americans looking for health care into "junk insurance"
- hedora 11mo agoPSA for folks in Northern California: The Sutter Health Network / Palo Alto Medical Foundation routinely get caught committing widespread insurance fraud. They also offer products that seem to be junk insurance to me, but I’m not a lawyer. Here are three examples of their alleged widespread insurance fraud: https://allaboutlawyer.com/claim-your-sutter-health-settlement-money-228-5m-available-for-northern-california-residents/ https://allaboutlawyer.com/claim-your-sutter-health-settleme... https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/sutter-health-accused-of-fraud-by-state-2375081.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/sutter-health-accused... https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/government-intervenes-false-claims-act-lawsuit-against-sutter-health-and-palo-alto-medical https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/government-intervene... Some of those suites involve other big providers, like KP. Not sure if any of the healthcare providers around here are reputable at this point.
- BLKNSLVR 11mo agoSo Luigi Mangione had no effect, or it's too early to tell?
- bigfishrunning 11mo agoHe never had any chance of having any effect, except maybe for an increased bodyguard budget. A single murderer rarely triggers societal change.
- potato3732842 11mo ago>A single murderer rarely triggers societal change. I was gonna bring up Franz but you said "rarely" not "never". I think people are wising up to the fact that at scale modern forms of insurance, all forms not just health, is not a real product that delivers value to both parties, it's a contrived way to use government force to lighten everyone's pockets to the benefit of a few while paying out only as needed to justify the pretext and the only thing it really shares with it's free-ish market equivalents from 50+yr ago is the name. So there will probably be more murders before things change.
- dboreham 11mo agoGreat powers were already on the brink by the time the archduke thing happened. It would have been some other trigger.
- potato3732842 11mo agoIf Franz isn't good enough we can do Caesar. You can call things inevitable and on some level they likely are but +/-5yr makes a huge difference in the exact turns of events and the form that history takes because at the very least it determines who the parties involved are and/or affects the circumstances they are balancing. Do we still get Hitler if WW1 starts later or goes slightly differently? You don't get the modern world without Hitler. Us typing this here and now with the world as it is is necessarily predicated on a ton of things who's details came down in large part to chance. And it goes back way, way, way further than that.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- tourmalinetaco 11mo agoIf Ted K. had no effect what hope did Mangione have?
- cebert 11mo agoWell, the woman Ted threw into Poucha Pond didn’t have any ties to health care.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- LorenPechtel 11mo agoNote that most of his complaint is with experimental stuff. Why should insurance be required to cover experimental stuff? It's basically chasing the illusion of a solution.
- darth_avocado 11mo agoJust use Kaiser if you’re down bad. It’s cheaper than the absolute cheapest scam insurances and will get you a decent level of care.
- jpollock 11mo agoKaiser (Nor Cal), has been amazing. I highly recommend them. I hear lots of complaints from friends who have other providers, but Kaiser "just works". We've been through cancer and diabetes (so far).
- nothercastle 11mo agoYou actually get great level of care they suck at advertising though and most people think they are bottom tier when they are not
- pengaru 11mo agoUntil you find yourself desperate for a malpractice suit, and Surprise! your insurer and care provider are on the same team and you already agreed to arbitration when you got that insurance. A friend had his life wrecked by Kaiser, and none of the attorneys he consulted wanted to touch the case because according to the attorneys they had an army of lawyers and he'd already agreed to arbitration when getting the insurance. The max they claimed could be won wouldn't even cover the legal fees. You definitely don't want insurance from the same team you're getting the insured services from. It's the conflict of interests to end all conflict of interests, especially in the context of health care.
- triceratops 11mo agoFrom what you tell us, binding arbitration sounds like the actual problem. Not the insurer and provider being the same company. To me the latter is an alignment of interests. The insurer will happily pay for preventive screenings and care to save itself costs on treatment later.
- autoexec 11mo ago
- aidenn0 11mo agoSutter recently bought the company that my kids' pediatrician works for. The changes so far have been sufficiently negative that I have to decide if I want to go through the pain of finding a new pediatrician or just stick it out for the next few years until my youngest switches to a GP.
- lumost 11mo agoOoc what issues do you encounter?
- nickff 11mo agoThis Pluralistic post seems very rant-y, but it links to a Bloomberg piece that seems like a better source for backing up the claim: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-obamacare-open-enrollment-google-search/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-obamacare-open-enrol... As someone with a little experience with the 'advertiser side' of Google, they also push junk to their paying clients, using every opportunity to sell terrible, worthless placements to advertisers. Which is to say that the problem is not that 'searchers' are the product, the problem is that Google is not focused on creating value for its counter-parties.
- rubyfan 11mo agoWhy should it? If you aren’t satisfied you can take your business elsewhere… wait never mind, there is no alternative.
- nickff 11mo agoI agree that Google is benefiting from being the dominant player in a two-sided marketplace (which makes it harder to compete), but we can always choose not to use it, both as advertisers and as searchers. Google’s exploitation of its counter-parties has definitely caused me to use alternatives more and more often.
- tourmalinetaco 11mo agoGoogle is my third choice for searches. I try Ecosia first, but their indexing is garbage so I typically then go to Brave. If Brave doesn’t have it then I submit to the evil overlords at Google. Thankfully Brave indexing is pretty good so it‘s had a measurable impact on the amount of search I actually put through Google.
- rubyfan 11mo agoI use DDG on the consumer side but you, I and most people on HN are outliers, the other 90% don’t care enough to use something else yet.
- morkalork 11mo agoI hate to be that guy but is it Google's responsibility to police legally operating insurance companies? It's not their problem that USA has a trash insurance market and a backwards healthcare system.
- ggm 11mo agoI believe traditional publishers had pretty specific liability for the stuff they carry. There's no magic exclusion for ads that I know of.
- gruez 11mo agoSource? Specifically, examples where publishers were sued for fraudulent products they advertised?
- ggm 11mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beardstown_Ladies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beardstown_Ladies is the exemplar
- toast0 11mo agoThat's a book publisher being liable for the book it published. We're looking for a newspaper publisher being liable for the ad it published. Not a story it published.
- tourmalinetaco 11mo agoLegally? No. However, due to their alteration of search results anything that becomes the top is effectively an endorsement regardless of whether it was chosen by the black box or their employees. They already remove legally operating websites they disagree with. Since they’re selective editors with multiple lost antitrust suits, the only thing we as consumers can do is criticize. Especially as most of these companies top the charts due to SEO spam and not genuine traffic.
- venturecruelty 11mo ago
- prairieroadent 11mo ago[dead]
- PeakKS 11mo agoTo be fair, it's all "junk insurance"
- Brendinooo 11mo ago> 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: Seems worth noting that "sleazy" and "suck their co-religionists into" are (unfounded, as far as I can tell) opinions, "cost the world" is flat-out false and the exact reason why they are an appealing option, and "and leave you high and dry when you or your kids get hurt or sick" is also an unfounded claim. His only citation for any of this is talking about someone who doesn't like morality clauses, but...picked it anyways, presumably because it didn't cost the world? Some are better than others. I picked the one that looked the most like real insurance and has a >30 year track record of not leaving people high and dry. I've been on it for almost seven years and it's worked out well so far.
- LorenPechtel 11mo agoThey (religious health share stuff) all have an inherent, fundamental flaw in that there is no actual insurance obligation. It's like the old days, get sick enough and you get dropped. But without even an illusion of being able to keep it. I'm not going to blame the author for failing to prove something long established.
- Brendinooo 11mo ago"get sick enough and you get dropped" is a very, very different statement than "leave you high and dry when you or your kids get hurt or sick". And if it's "like the old days", then it must not be some some uniquely sleazy thing. I'll also add: >these plans do 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... He lumps sharing ministries in with this, but it's worth noting that the company I'm with was explicitly exempted by the ACA from the outset. It's not a loophole. Health sharing ministries that existed before the year 2000 could be used to satisfy the individual mandate. So he's being misleading here as well.
- ruralfam 11mo ago"It's omnienshittified, a partnership between the enshittified search giant and the shittiest parts of the totally enshittified health industry." Omnienshittified: May go down as the most hilarious - yet prescient - new word this century. (In the USA of course.)
- LorenPechtel 11mo agoI don't really see that Google is causing this, just showing what's out there. Search inherently selects for advertising because companies craft their sites to look good for on the search terms. The problem is that these things exist at all.
- venturecruelty 11mo agoIt's a shame that Google is powerless to downrank websites for companies committing fraud. I wish we could help them.
- more_corn 11mo agoThis is sarcasm right? It’s often difficult to tell sarcasm from honest idiocy.