A wild health insurance hustle

An Arm and a Leg

Society & Culture, Medicine, Health, Health & Fitness, Documentary

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

When a New York couple purchased a health insurance plan from a telemarketer, everything sounded legit. Meds, doctors, tests? All covered.

But it didn't take long for them to realize they'd been “hustled” – ending up with bills for thousands of dollars, and leaving them no choice but to skip important medical care.

In their series “Health Care Hustlers,” Bloomberg reporters Zach Mider and Zeke Faux uncover the exact nature of the scheme – how this couple, as well as thousands of others, signed up for health plans by unknowingly agreeing to work “fake jobs.”

Zach and Zeke join us to unpack the many surprising layers to this business— involving a subculture of unscrupulous telemarketers, a TV-sitcom-writer-turned-investor who masterminded the idea, and the legal gray area that allows these plans to proliferate.

Reminder: If you need to sign up for health insurance, the place to go is healthcare.gov. (As we’ve warned before: Don’t even Google it.)

No matter what, shopping for insurance requires a ton of homework. We’ve got a guide for you in this Starter Pack.

Here’s a transcript of this episode.

Send your stories and questions. Or call 724 ARM-N-LEG.Of course we’d love for you to support this show.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Pacific Northwest is the perfect place to write horror. There's so much inspiration.
0:05.9	Dense ancient forests, Gothic misty winters, supernatural traditions, and there are a lot of good coffee shops if you need a spot to write.
0:15.3	I'm Katie Campbell, and on the latest episode of Meet Me Here, I talked to local horror author Isabel Kanias about her favorite haunts.
0:24.1	Listen to Meet Me here on the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:29.6	Hey, I'm Ton Vin, host of Seattle Eat, a food podcast from the Seattle Times and KUOW.
0:36.3	What comes to mind when you think of instant ramen?
0:39.3	Many people just see a cheap snack, but chef Josh Radza sees an opportunity.
0:45.0	On the latest episode of Seattle Eats, Josh shows us how to elevate instant ramen into a delicacy without breaking the bank.
0:53.1	Listen to Seattle Eats on the KOWW app or wherever you get your podcast.
0:59.2	Hey there.
1:00.6	This story's outline may sound familiar, but what's underneath?
1:06.0	What we unravel here, it's a new kind of thing, and it's weird. And it could become huge. So, a couple from New York,
1:19.3	Sarah and Joe Strominger, started new businesses, so they needed to buy their own health insurance
1:23.5	for the first time. And Sarah says the New York state marketplace with Obamacare plans seemed a little
1:29.9	risky. If they got a subsidy and then their new businesses did really well, they might have to pay that
1:36.2	subsidy back. As me business owners, we had not a clue of how much we were going to make in the year. So we were
1:42.9	nervous about how much we were going to have in the year. So we were nervous about how much we
1:44.9	were going to have to back pay. So looking elsewhere seemed like a cautious thing to do.
1:50.9	Google led them to a site that offered quotes for insurance policies. Just enter your phone number.
1:56.2	And they started getting calls from telemarketers, a lot of them, and eventually they picked the plan one of them offered.
2:03.4	Sarah and Joe thought they were being reasonably careful. After all, insurance is a regulated business.
2:08.9	We're thinking it's monitored. We had no clue that this was kind of like a free-for-all.
	...

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