Google steers Americans looking for health care into "junk insurance" -- Cory Doctorow

[erronis]

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/25/open-season/#open-enrollment

Ain't the capitalistic way great?

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.

. . .

[TheBlackAdder]

1. Many of Google's top search results are paid by scammer sites.

[purr-rat beauty]

2. Google is becoming a dump

Their AI push is annoying and useless

[global1]

3. The Insurance Companies Are Sure Spending A Lot Of Money Promoting The Advantage Programs....

There must be great profits in it for them because they are going above and beyond marketing these plans.

Some companies are even coming up with clever creative names for these plans to deceive people.

It's really a crime. But I guess it goes with the territory under Tr**p and the Repugs.