Google steers Americans looking for health care into "junk insurance"

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

52•hn_acker•2h ago

Comments

hedora•1h ago

PSA 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-settleme...

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/sutter-health-accused...

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•1h ago

So Luigi Mangione had no effect, or it's too early to tell?

bigfishrunning•45m ago

He never had any chance of having any effect, except maybe for an increased bodyguard budget. A single murderer rarely triggers societal change.

potato3732842•8m 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 insurance at scale, 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.

tourmalinetaco•12m ago

If Ted K. had no effect what hope did Mangione have?

darth_avocado•46m ago

Just 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•3m ago

Kaiser (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).

nickff•1h ago

This 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-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•1h ago

Why should it? If you aren’t satisfied you can take your business elsewhere… wait never mind, there is no alternative.

nickff•1h ago

I 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•34m ago

Google 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.

herbst•14m ago

It's incredible hard to build a as based business around fairness. In 99% of all cases it's going to be a highest bidder thing.

morkalork•37m ago

I 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•32m ago

I believe traditional publishers had pretty specific liability for the stuff they carry. There's no magic exclusion for ads that I know of.

tourmalinetaco•13m ago

Legally? 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.

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Comments

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