How to avoid health insurance scams

Welcome back. Scammers, we know, can try to trick you in so many ways. And one of the biggest and fastest growing ways is health insurance scams. So joining us right now to talk about this and how to avoid scams is Chris Cook from Priority Health. Chris, thanks so much for being here this morning on our show. So tell us, you know, these are fast-growing scams. What are you seeing right now? Well, unfortunately, as you know, health care and health insurance can be a very complex topic. And unfortunately, there are people out there that are more than happy to take advantage of that and steal our hard-earned money. They will text you, they will email you, they will call you. And once they get you on the phone, they will, the hard sell begins and they start looking for your personal and your financial information. This generally starts to ramp up during that open enrollment period at the end of the year when we're all signing up for our health care. But the fact is, is it happens year-round and we always have to be hyper-vigilant for this type of activity. So are these people basically just looking for your information and then taking it or are they actually like somehow accessing your health insurance and scamming you that way? How is this working? Well, generally what we're talking about here is more where they're trying to get your information or they're trying to get you to make a payment and actually give them some financial information. There are also scams related to health care where they're filing false claims, they're billing for services that won't perform that type of thing. But what I'm liking to focus on here is people that are becoming the victims themselves and actually losing their financial information or their personal information. How do folks discern what's real and what's not? Well, kind of the telltale sign is first of all, someone's going to be reaching out to you. You didn't solicit them to call you. They've called you, texted you, emailed you, got you on the line and they start putting the pressure on. The pressure begins immediately. They will tell you they're from the government and that if you don't make a payment, that you'll somehow be violating some kind of law or they're with a health plan and your last premium payment wasn't received. And if you don't pay me now, you're going to lose your coverage. There are also situations where there are organizations that are selling products that appear to be insurance products, but they actually offer very little coverage, if at all. And you know, they know what they're doing and they know how to get your attention. What should people do if they, you know, even have an inkling that this may not be real? How can they get help? Okay, again, for the first thing, assume anybody that contacts you, it could potentially be a scam. So the first thing you do is you find out who they are, where they're from, why they're calling and you say, I'm going to actually hang up and I'm going to call the organization that you say you're with and I'm going to validate who you're with. And if it's legitimate, I'll either get my answer when I call that organization or they'll tell me to call you back. And so that is the number one way to avoid this type of thing. You just need to get past that emotional pressure to make a decision to give up your information. If you can just get past that, then you have time to really think about it and realize that you're being scammed. If folks want more information, can they go to Priority Health's website or something like that? Absolutely. If you feel like you're being contacted by Priority Health and you're questioning that at all, please call our customer service line using the number that's on the back of your card or on our website. You can also go to our website or access our ThinkHealth journal site and that has much more information on these scams, how to identify them and how to avoid being impacted by them. Chris, such valuable information. Thank you so much for being with us today. We appreciate it. Thank you.