Health Insurance Quotes – birth of a new scam?

Are you self-employed and using the web to look for health insurance you can afford? Be careful or you could get – or give – much more than you bargain for.

Self-employed means self-insured. Self-employed people (like me)  have no employer to pay – and hide from us – the true cost of our health insurance. We get to figure out where to get the $10,000 – $20,000 insurance costs each year for coverage that doesn’t kick in until you’ve spent that much out of pocket.

But this posting isn’t about how screwed up our health care system is – you know that already. It’s about people who I believe are taking advantage of people’s need to find health insurance they can afford.

In my own search for affordable health insurance I signed up for an email that promised to help me find lower cost health insurance by getting quotes from multiple Health Insurers in my area. The email came. It linked me to three OTHER companies that promise to do the leg work of actually getting the quotes. Since I’ve just had the usual large annual rate increase in my insurance (almost 20%) I decided to give one of these services a try.

First, they asked me to fill out demographic information about all members of my family and disclose any pre-existing conditions, plus provide some basic contact information.  At the bottom of the form was a check box to accept their terms of service.

As an IT executive I got in the habit of reading the fine print in contracts, ALL the fine print. Yes, it takes time, but it’s interesting, and sometimes surprising and enlightening to read the Terms of Service and Privacy Statements companies ask you to accept. For the most part, these are long, boring, paranoid, and generally benign – you simply agree that no matter how badly they mess up, they aren’t in any way responsible or liable. But for this health care insurance quoting service I found something interesting — and more than a bit worrisome — buried deep in their Terms of Service:

The personal profile information you submit to HPQ remains your property, but by submitting that information to HPQ, you grant HPQ, the right to use that information for marketing purposes. HPQ may also use such information for content improvement and feedback purposes. We may sell the personal information that you supply to us and we may join together with other businesses to bring selected retail opportunities to our members. These businesses may include providers of direct marketing services and applications, including lookup and reference, data enhancement, suppression and validation. In addition, HPQ reserves the right to release current or past member information in the event HPQ believes that the membership is being or has been used in violation of the Rules or to commit unlawful acts, if the information is subpoenaed, if HPQ is sold or acquired, or when HPQ deems it necessary or appropriate. By agreeing to these terms, you hereby consent to disclosure of any record or communication to any Third Party when HPQ, in its sole discretion, determines the disclosure to be appropriate.

(Bold Emphasis added)

In other words, anything you tell them is not “private” in any way. They can use it to direct market you and your family, and not just for health care services, but for anything. And they can SELL YOUR INFORMATION. Their Terms of Service could just as well be called a “general full release statement.”  Check the box accepting their Terms of Service and your name, weight, age, marital status, zip, preexisting conditions — anything you give them about you, your spouse, your children — is now available to this company to sell as they see fit,  for any use.

Why would anyone accept terms like these? Probably because the whole thing is put in a wrapper on the website that looks a lot like the HIPAA forms you see at your doctor’s office. But those forms tell you how the doctor cannot disclose anything without your permission; just the opposite of this agreement.

Are these companies really in the business of getting you useful medical quotes? Or are they marketing list companies preying upon people’s need for affordable medical insurance to gather information for general marketing purposes? Since they don’t seem to think the HIPAA laws apply to them, I suspect they have little to do with health care, and everything to do with marketing.

Is their service worth the disclosure? Will they find someone who will sell you good insurance you can afford and save you big bucks on your Health Insurance? I doubt it, but I can’t tell you for sure if any useful quotes come from these companies… because I wouldn’t accept their Terms of Service. But I know what I suspect…

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