Chasing Big Money With the Health-Care Hustlers of South Florida

A wannabe hip-hop mogul and a onetime porn-video recruiter turned Obamacare into a lucrative get-rich-quick scheme—with an assist from Bain Capital. By Zeke Faux and Zachary R Mider

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chasing big money with the health care hustlers of South Florida,
A wannabe hip hop mogul, and a one time porn
video recruiter turned Obamacare into a lucrative, get rich Quick
scheme with an assist from Bain Capital by Zeke Fox
and Zachary Miner read aloud by Mark Leedorf. Hi, guys,

(00:22):
it's Taylor Swift. Remember those stimulus checks. Well, there's a
new thing going viral. If you were poor and online
last year. The ads were inescapable, flashing images of cash
and Amazon boxes narrated by a I Faked celebrities such
as Swift, podcaster Joe Rogan, or game show host Steve

(00:42):
Harvey each described a secretive government program that handed out money.
All you had to do was ask. They're giving out
sixty four hundred dollars to any one who makes the call.
Intoned to fake doctor Phil. If you don't act now,
you're basically throwing away sixty four hundred dollars, said a
shirtless render ring of misogynistic influencer Andrew Tait as he

(01:03):
tossed something at the camera. That's just stupid. The ads
were so pervasive that the Administration of then President Joe
Biden had to deny the existence of a secret stimulus program.
The government was offering valuable insurance subsidies, but not any
kind of cash card, and certainly not sixty four hundred dollars.
That didn't stop the ads. The news outlet four h

(01:25):
four Media was able to find hundreds of them, which
had been viewed one hundred and ninety five million times
on YouTube alone before being taken down. The ads were deceptive,
but they weren't trying to con people out of their money,
at least not directly. The goal was to sign them
up for actual government subsidized health insurance plans, whether they
wanted them or not. People responding to the ads were

(01:49):
routed through a network of middleman to call centers, many
of them in South Florida. Telemarketers there would wave off
questions about cash giveaways and sign up customers for health
insurance in instead, sometimes without their knowledge. The plans were
free after federal subsidies, but they nevertheless upended many lives.
Some people were switched off their old plan without their knowledge,

(02:11):
finding out only when they were turned away by a
doctor who didn't accept their new coverage. Others had to
repay subsidies they hadn't actually qualified for. Hundreds of thousands
of people complained to federal regulators that they'd been duped.
One of the largest call centers selling the plans was
outside Fort Lauderdale, in a three story building flanked by
palm trees and guarded by hulking men wearing body armor

(02:35):
and carrying assault rifles. The batmobilesque motor trike belonging to
the Boss was often parked outside. Flush with cash, he
commissioned a diamond encrusted necklace with a saucer size pendant
in the shape of interlocking ms for his nickname Money Matt.
His business Enhance Health, was, in his telling, one of

(02:56):
the most prolific brokers of Affordable Care Act compliant health
plans in the country, collecting more than one million sign
ups in twenty twenty three alone. Money Matt, whose real
name is Matt Herman, wasn't the operation's main financial backer.
Nicknamed notwithstanding that was Bain Capital, the Boston based private
equity firm which had staked him seventy five million dollars

(03:19):
to create in hands. As chief executive officer, Hermann directed
much of that cash to a former electronic dance music
promoter turned online marketing guru Brandon Bowski, who connected him
with internet advertisers. Together they turned the dull business of
selling health insurance into a wild, get rich quick scheme.

(03:40):
The song opens with a woman panting suggestively over a
Stacado keyboard beat. Ah money Matt, she moans. Then Herman
comes in. You know there's money in the building when
I walk in, this mother effort, he blusters. The track
hate Us was released in April twenty twenty fee. Herman,

(04:01):
then thirty seven, had long wanted to be a hip
hop mogul, and with Enhance's profits, he could at least
act the part. He's tall and buff with a beard
so closely cropped it looks painted on. On Instagram, he
amassed more than one million followers with photos of his
jealousy inducing lifestyle, his Bentley, Lamborghini and McLaren, his private

(04:22):
jet flights, race car team, and parties with Paris Hilton, Rihanna,
and Fat Joe. He was also prone to posting hustlebro aphorisms.
In twenty twenty three, he shared a photo of himself
wearing a suit and blue tie, shaking Biden's hand under it,
he wrote, in order to become the one percent, you
must do what the other ninety nine percent won't. During

(04:45):
a phone interview, Herman comes off much less brash. He
defends his work at Enhance, saying that any misleading ads
were the work of external vendors and that he stopped
doing business with anyone he caught making them. He says
he reported some of those vendors to regulate, but can't
get into the details. I am proud of the work
our team did to deliver real coverage to millions of

(05:06):
Americans and to operate responsibly, he adds later on in
an email. Health care is a right and no American
should be taken advantage of by predatory actors. Before he
hooked up with Bain Capital, Hermann was just one of
many hustlers trying to sell health insurance in South Florida.
There are hundreds of call centers for this purpose around

(05:27):
Fort Lauderdale alone. People who work there refer to them
as rooms and say they live up to the shady
reputation that Florida has had, at least since Charles Ponzi
on the Lamb after the demise of his namesake scheme,
set up shop there a century ago and started pitching
Swampland as prime real estate to unsuspecting investors. The South

(05:47):
Florida rooms tended to push what health policy experts called
junk insurance, cheaper, non comprehensive coverage that often leaves customers
stuck with giant bills. The sales pitch was generally that
the insurance would cover almost anything, but in fact it
covered almost nothing. According to Matt Panzer, a former salesman
who worked early in his career at a room with Herman,

(06:10):
each sale generated hundreds of dollars in commissions. These terrible
plans only benefit the agents, Panzer says. Most of the
people we sell to are broke. They're scraping together their
last dollars and it doesn't do anything for them. By
the time Herman was in his early twenties, he was
in charge of his own sales team, according to two
of its former salesmen. They say they worked out of

(06:33):
a warehouse behind a strip club north of Miami, tricking
customers by passing off junk insurance as major medical coverage.
We're assassins, we're real killers on the phone, recalls Gary McDonald,
one of the former salesmen, it doesn't take us long
to gain someone's trust. McDonald says he dealt heroin and
worked as a pimp before getting into insurance. He remembers

(06:56):
spending lunch breaks with the sales colleagues at the strip
club for they're free wings. But unlike others in the
business who'd blow their money on partying in drugs, McDonald
says Herman was focused solely on getting ahead. In a
book McDonald's self published about his experiences in the industry,
he describes Herman as possessing an almost preternatural confidence. I've

(07:18):
rubbed shoulders with a lot of cocky, narcissistic sure of themselves.
Mother efforts before, but nobody on the level of Matt Herman.
McDonald wrote in the book buyers are liars the untold
stories of downlines. A downline in industry jargon is a
smaller brokerage that sells on behalf of a larger one.
Herman disputes McDonald's claims, but declines to discuss the details.

(07:42):
A lawyer for Enhance said in an email that McDonald
seems more interested in producing shock value than verifiable and
reliable substance. After Donald Trump became president in twenty seventeen,
his administration loosened insurance rules to make it easier to
offer cheaper, skimpier plans, and the South Florida brokers seized
the opportunity. A company called Health Insurance Innovations started selling

(08:06):
junk insurance on a massive scale. Hermann broker deals between
the company and Florida rooms, but in twenty eighteen, the
Federal Trade Commission started investigating whether it was using deceptive practices,
putting a chill on the entire junk insurance business. The company,
which later changed its name to Benefit Technologies, eventually paid

(08:27):
a one hundred million dollar fine to the FTC over
what the regulator called its sham insurance. One top broker
was convicted of fraud last year and sentenced to twenty
five years in prison. Herman wasn't an employee of Health
Insurance Innovations and wasn't a defendant in either case. In
the phone interview, he says it isn't fair to call
the plans junk and denies misleading any one about them

(08:50):
outside of open enrollment periods. He says the plans were
the only option for many customers. It's not the greatest coverage,
but it's better than having nothing. By twenty twenty one,
Hermann was promoting a night club in Miami, still brokering
deals between insurers and rooms, and looking for his next
big thing. That's when Bain came along. Co Founded by

(09:12):
Mitt Romney before he ran for office, Bain Capital is
one of the most prestigious names in private equity, with
one hundred and eighty five billion dollars in assets. In
twenty twenty one, it hired Matt Popoley, an executive with
long experience and insurance finance, to raise a one billion
dollar fund for insurance investments. One area Popoly wanted Bain

(09:33):
to get into was call centers, but the company needed
an expert to facilitate the play. An executive at a
Bain owned company knew Herman and made introductions. Bain ended
up buying Herman's brokerage business for nine million dollars, according
to a person with knowledge of the deal who requested
anonymity because the terms were private. But the company had
bigger plans for Herman. It formed Enhance Health, put up

(09:57):
the cash, and named him CEO. The The deal was
the first for Popoli's insurance fund. The original plan was
for Enhance to sell Medicare advantage plans, which are privately
managed alternatives to traditional insurance for retirees. The market was
growing fast, and Enhance's pitch was that it could help
customers find the best plans from a confusing array of options.

(10:20):
Then it would earn money from the monthly commissions the
insurers paid. We like the economics of the business, Popoley
told The Wall Street Journal in November twenty twenty one.
A spokeswoman for Baine and Popoly declined to comment for
this story. The Medicare advantage strategy proved challenging. It was
hard to find new customers, and many of the ones

(10:40):
Enhanced did land would get pitched by other telemarketers and
switch plans soon after. The company was losing money, According
to a former Enhance executive who requested anonymity to discuss
internal matters. Luckily, Hermann had a connection elsewhere in the
South Florida insurance rooms who'd found plans that were easier
to sell. Bowski, the marketing expert, in his own telling,

(11:03):
Bowski had hit rock bottom when he discovered the South
Florida rooms. The worst moment came around twenty sixteen. He
was living in his Honda Civic so broke that he
stole a dinner roll from Walmart, he said on The
Digital Social Hour, one of several podcasts on which he's
told his life story. On the same episode, he recalled
being raised in a family of salespeople and learning by

(11:26):
the time he was three how to manipulate others. All
of life is manipulation, Bowski said, social engineering is like
the most basic thing as a human. His parapatetic career
honed his ability to persuade people to do things they
probably shouldn't. On the podcasts, he described hustling for real
money in online games such as RuneScape, recruiting models for Bangbros.

(11:50):
Porn videos, and selling a ton of drugs. Bowski said
he started selling health insurance after seeing Craigslist ads dangling
pay as high as four thousand dollars a week. Florida
State business records show that, like Hermann, he distributed plans
for health insurance innovations. Bowski recalled rising quickly through the

(12:11):
ranks to become the manager of a large call center,
then starting his own small one. He sold the room
to Enhance not long after it was founded, helping Herman
get his operation off the ground. According to a filing
in an unrelated lawsuit, the room had been a sideline
for Bowski. By then, he was focused on a different
aspect of the call center business, known as lead generation.

(12:32):
Lead generators place ads on Google or social media promising
to help people find the best health plan. Anyone who
responds to the ad is redirected to a call center,
which pays a fee to the lead generator for each prospect.
Bowski's company, Minerva Marketing, acted as a middleman, paying the
people who placed the ads for each call they generated,

(12:53):
and reselling those prospects to call centers. Minerva also made
some ads itself. In twenty twenty one, Bowski realized lead
generators were ignoring a big new market. That year, as
part of its response to the COVID nineteen pandemic, the
Biden administration had boosted subsidies for Obamacare, making plans free
for potentially millions more people who hadn't previously been able

(13:16):
to afford health insurance. The plans didn't pay big commissions,
but rooms could still make money if they sold enough
of them. All Bowski had to do was find call
centers to try it out. Shit, I gotta find somebody
who likes to sell poor people. He recounted in twenty
twenty three on a podcast called The Affiliate Marketing Show,

(13:36):
he spent months working to persuade Florida room owners to
give his new leads a shot. Most weren't interested, he said,
but Herman and Enhance were game to try. We'll be
right back with chasing big money with the healthcare hustlers
of South Florida. Welcome back to chasing big money with

(13:58):
the healthcare hustlers of South Florida. How the deep fake
ads entered the picture is unknown. No one Bloomberg BusinessWeek
spoke with for this story could pinpoint their origins. They
are generally posted by fly by night operators who leave
little trace. One person who worked for a US based
company that made some, including ones depicting Biden and Steve Harvey,

(14:21):
remembers the ads being prevalent by late twenty twenty two.
The man, who requested anonymity because he still works in
the business, says they were based on a kernel of truth.
On average, people who receive Obamacare subsidies get a discount
on their insurance of about five hundred dollars a month,
but the promise of free insurance alone didn't generate clicks.

(14:42):
Advertisers competed by making their ads more and more misleading.
The only ads that make money are like, hey, you
get a sixty four hundred dollars flex card. The man
says he recalls selling leads to Bowski's Minerva, which he
says they resold to call centers. Bowski didn't respect to
questions for this story, but a lawsuit he filed against

(15:03):
one advertiser says that the terms of Minerva's contract prohibited
misleading ads and that the company cut off the advertiser
after seeing a proposed ad touting a spending card. And
Bowski has criticized competitors for using false advertising. You've got
guys that are running crazy, aggressive, borderline free money ads,

(15:23):
Bowski said on the Affiliate Marketing Show in twenty twenty three.
It drives my costs up and it doesn't look good
for the industry. But a former sales manager who worked
at a down line affiliated with Enhance that bought leads
from Bowski and who requested anonymity to avoid angering others
in the insurance business, says almost all the prospects his
call center got from Minerva expected cash cards. In an

(15:47):
internal Minerva group chat that was quoted in a separate lawsuit,
an employee joked about it, saying everyone thinks they're getting money,
which they are in the form of a subsidy. Lmao o.
Elia Kim Brown, a former sales agent at an Enhanced
affiliated call center that also bought leads from Minerva, says
prospects would regularly mention seeing ads featuring celebrities. I saw

(16:12):
the ad with Andrew Tait, I want that money, Brown
recalls more than one client asking. Armed with Bowski's leads,
Enhance's call center was buzzing. Hermann hired more agents who
needed more leads. We kind of scaled them to the moon.
Bowski later recalled of Enhance. A former Enhance executive who

(16:32):
asked for anonymity because speaking about a former employer might
affect job prospects, says that at times in twenty twenty two,
the company's payments to Bowski reached one million dollars a week.
By then, Enhance's office was packed with hundreds of agents
fielding calls on headsets in their cubicles. More than a
dozen former employees BusinessWeek interviewed said almost all the callers

(16:55):
were looking for cash guards, not insurance. Top performers may
as much as five thousand dollars a week. A barber
who carried his clippers in a Louis Vuitton fanny pack
would come by to cut herman's hair. Less successful agents
would smoke weed in the parking lot. As one of
the former employees put it, bro It's Florida. The armed

(17:17):
guards were hired after an employee who'd been fired threatened
to come back and shoot up the office. According to Hermann,
the guards ended up intercepting other disgruntled workers who really
did try to bring in guns. He says it became
a common thing. We arrested several people with guns on site.
One of the former agents, Andrew Laura, says fast money

(17:38):
was what drew him to an Enhanced down line. He
was twenty one, still living with his mother and working
at another call center when he heard that top agents
at Enhance could earn three thousand dollars a week. The
gig seemed easy enough. All he had to do was
answer the phone and sign up callers for health insurance.
He soon noticed, though, that most of his callers were

(17:58):
asking about some kind of stimulus program. One was particularly insistent,
saying he'd seen an ad with Steve Harvey urging people
to call and get the money. Scrolling through social media.
Later that day, Laura saw the ad for himself. I've
been telling you guys for months to claim this free
sixty four hundred dollars, Harvey appeared to say, wagging his finger.

(18:20):
Laura could tell it was fake. He remembers asking his
boss how to handle the issue and being told to
deflect questions about free cash and sign up the callers
for insurance instead. We weren't allowed to say they were
going to get it, and we sure as hell weren't
supposed to say they weren't, Laura says, sipping a sprite
at a tuckeria in Fort Lauderdale. You have to throw

(18:41):
away a little bit of your morality. Laura says. He
knew it wasn't right, but felt conflicted because he wanted
to earn money to help his family. He also made
enough to buy his dream car, an Infinity Q sixty,
and move out of his mother's house. He convinced himself
that even if customers were being misled, signing them up
for free health care was harmless. The way I made

(19:03):
my peace with it. Some of these people don't have
health insurance, he says, at least I'm getting them something
to help them. Hermann says the company trained agents to
be honest, not deceptive, and those who were caught misleading
customers were fired. We probably terminated more agents, given how
big we were, than anybody in the country, he says.

(19:24):
Michael Fachibene, a spokesman for Inhance, says that the idea
almost all callers wanted cash cards is demonstrably false, and
that the company required anyone it bought leads from to
conduct themselves ethically. Lead vendors caught violating the rules were
blacklisted and reported to regulators. He adds our rigorous policies

(19:44):
around enrollment have always required that lead vendors conduct themselves
ethically in full compliance with the law. Facchiabene says, whenever
we received any incoming calls asking about cash cards, our
policy was to ensure that callers understood they were enrolling
in HEA health insurance and they were referred to the
health planned carriers who would have the accurate information about

(20:05):
what they were offering. The ads themselves, Fetchubenny points out,
were made by companies enhanced didn't own or control. Former
employees say the rules left room for maneuvering. Some insurers do,
in fact offer cash rewards of a few hundred dollars
through wellness programs, though not cash cards worth thousands of dollars.
Instead of setting callers straight, they recall, they would wave

(20:29):
off questions about giving away money by saying the carrier
would have the details. Half the time, they didn't even
know they were signing up for insurance, says Jason Horton,
who worked in Enhance's customer attention department and would field
complaints from people who were angry they hadn't received cash cards.
It's crazy to say, but it's true. Some people who

(20:50):
called Enhance already had ACA compliant health insurance, which they
would lose if they signed up for a new plan.
Even unknowingly, an unexpected change in coverage could leave customers
unable to visit their preferred doctors or losing money they'd
paid toward their old deductible. One woman from Georgia wrote
in a twenty twenty four complaint to the Better Business

(21:10):
Bureau that she'd had to put off surgery to fix
a detached retina after Enhance switched her to a plan
with a deductible she couldn't afford. Another person from Georgia
complained of signing up to get free cash and being
surprised to find instead that their insurance policy had been switched.
These guys are nothing but crooks who trick people, the

(21:30):
person wrote in their complaint, I was stupid to believe them.
To qualify for the subsidized insurance, Enhance was pitching, callers
generally had to earn at least fifteen thousand dollars a year.
Those who made less should have been referred to Medicaid,
the government's insurance program for the poor instead. Some former
agents say they would coach callers to put on their

(21:53):
applications that they planned to earn at least fifteen thousand
dollars in the coming year, and sign them up anyway.
Employed caller would be asked if they thought they might
be able to get a job. The agents say they
didn't explain that when the customers filed their tax returns
for the year, they'd face penalties if they hadn't actually
earned enough money to qualify for Obamacare subsidies. Enhance was

(22:15):
structured so that many of its sales managers ran independent
companies the so called down lines. Some worked in house,
others ran call centers nearby, but all were supervised by
Enhance's quality assurance department. According to people familiar with the matter,
many of the managers had come up in the Florida rooms.
Others had more unusual resumes. One was a six foot six,

(22:39):
three hundred and thirty pound former bodyguard. Another ran popular
celebrity gossip accounts on social media. The jeweler who'd made
Herman's money, Matt Necklace, Johnny Dang, became a manager too.
You want to make big money, text me, Dang said
in a recruiting video he posted on Instagram, holding up
a big cheer outside Enhance's headquarters. Dang didn't respond to

(23:04):
requests for comment. McDonald, the former employee who wrote about
his experiences working for Herman, recalled in a sequel to
Buyers Our Liars that he was shocked when he first
arrived at Enhance's shiny new office and saw so many
people from his old downline days there, all those crooked
ass mother efforts under one giant umbrella, McDonald wrote in

(23:25):
Buyers Our Liars to American Greed, He says Herman recruited
him to run teams of agents who canvassed malls and
went door to door in poor neighborhoods to sign up customers.
McDonald remembers that his field agents would hand out twenty
dollars Subway or burger King gift cards to encourage people
to enroll. The plan worked so well that he was

(23:47):
soon managing one hundred and fifty people and making ten
thousand dollars a week. He says he was fired after
some of his field agents signed up homeless people who
didn't actually earn enough to qualify, he says, adding the
but there's no way it could have been his fault
because he was in jail for driving under the influence
when the problematic sign ups happened. McDonald wasn't the only

(24:08):
one who'd been earning a large paycheck. Herman's terms were
extremely favorable for the down line managers. One of them
says a single agent could generate six thousand dollars a
day in commissions. A former employee recalls a nineteen year
old manager bragging about being able to afford private jet flights.
The twenty three year old son of Bain's popoly secured

(24:30):
a down line two. According to people with knowledge of
the matter. In Hans's growth helped Popoly finish raising Bain's
one billion dollar insurance fund. New Mexico's state employee pension
fund committed sixty million dollars in twenty twenty three after
officials were given a pitch that mentioned in Hans's success
and said Bain was targeting twenty percent annualized returns. The

(24:52):
California Public Employee's retirement system put in one hundred and
twenty five million dollars. Bain also cited in Hans's he
hiring of minorities as an example of its investments in
diverse communities, writing on its website that Enhance Health's rapid
success has proven its possible to do well by doing good.
Enhance a success was also allowing Herman to live out

(25:14):
his dreams of celebrity, captured in a stream of posts
on his at moneymat three to five Instagram feed. At
the company's Christmas party in twenty twenty two, the rappers
Jim Jones and Fabulous performed. A few months later, Herman
sat next to Floyd Mayweather Junior at a press conference
promoting a fight with John gottyid the mob Boss's grandson.

(25:36):
After Mayweather beat Gotty in a controversial decision, guards wearing
enhanced hats got into an arena clearing scuffle with Gotti's entourage.
In July twenty twenty three, after an enhanced sponsored team
won a NASCAR race in Chicago, Herman celebrated in the
winner circle, then posted a photo of himself on a
private jet. The next month, he posed for a picture

(25:57):
with Vice President Kamala Harris a party to celebrate the
fiftieth anniversary of hip hop, and that November, Hermann helped
sponsor an awards show in Los Angeles. When he took
the stage in a Louis Vaton dinner jacket, the comedian
Tiffany Hattish looked him up and down. You got a wife,
m m Hattish said, looking like a snack. Herman says

(26:21):
the sponsorships weren't about self aggrandizement. Instead, they were part
of a plan to move away from paid digital marketing,
which had proven to be rife with misleading ads, and
find other ways to reach low income consumers. The digital
ads were the problem, he says, you have to figure
out other solutions. A former Enhance executive says the company

(26:42):
stopped doing business with Bowski in late twenty twenty three,
though not because of any misconduct. By then, Enhance wasn't
Bowski's only client. His reputation for marketing Affordable Care Act
plans had grown to the point that other lead generators
were calling him the King of Aca. He began driving
a one million dollar blue and white Bugatti Veyron and

(27:03):
bought a mansion in Las Vegas, decorating the exterior with
a brightly colored geometric mural. The Las Vegas Review Journal
said the house looked like a lava lamp had a
baby with a box of crowns. As words spread around
South Florida about the money to be made in Obamacare,
the competition for sign ups became increasingly cutthroat. Some brokers

(27:25):
and other agencies realized they didn't need to talk to
customers to earn a commission. The online portal they used
allowed them to switch someone's insurance with only their name, address,
and birth date. According to several brokers familiar with the activity,
Data released by federal regulators show that policies were switched
by the tens of thousands. It turned into literal thievery,

(27:47):
says one health insurance call center executive. Who asked not
to be identified because he does business with some of
the people involved. South Florida can ruin anything. When it
came time for the annual open enrollment period, Enhance fought back.
Several former employees say the company assigned a team to
go through the computer system, find customers who'd left, and

(28:09):
switched them back. Jimmy Fitzimmons, who worked on that team
for a few months, says his group switched thousands of
people a day without speaking to any of them. I
kind of felt like from the beginning it was just wrong,
he says. I kept getting told and trained that these
guys are already approved to be re enrolled. This year,
Enhance wrote in response to one complaint filed with regulators

(28:30):
that the customers consented to being re enrolled when they
originally signed up. The company didn't respond to questions about
policy switching. Agents across the country started noticing their customers disappearing,
according to the trade group Health Agents for America. John Stanton,
an independent insurance broker in Mesa, Arizona, says Enhance swapped

(28:51):
the plans of several of his clients. When he wrote
to the company to complain about one of the switches.
Enhance wrote back saying it had spoken to the client.
Stanton says the man was in a coma at the time.
In January twenty twenty four, a man who'd had his
policy switched by another brokerage, True Coverage, contacted a team
of class action lawyers. The lawyers, Jason DAWs and Jason Kellogg,

(29:15):
had grown accustomed to tips like this after winning a
twenty seven point five million dollar settlement for people who'd
allegedly been scammed by health insurance innovations. They didn't think
much of it at first. Then a week or so later,
an agent who'd recently left his job at True Coverage
contacted them and said the company was involved in misconduct.
Two leads suggested to Dawson Kellogg that something was up.

(29:39):
They put out a press release saying they were investigating
True Coverage for allegedly misleading consumers with deceptive ads that
offered cash cards, and tips started rolling in. Some of
them were about Enhance instead. True Coverage didn't respond to
a request for comment. Some days, DAWs recalls he'd line
up back to back meetings with agents on park benches

(30:01):
or at Starbucks coffee shops around Fort Lauderdale. There are
people who are tired of the unlawful conduct, who are
good agents or good folks who happen to work in
maybe a bad place, He says. Several of them signed
affidavits describing what they'd seen. That April, Doss and Kellogg
sued Enhance, Hermann, Bowski and True Coverage, seeking damages on

(30:23):
behalf of consumers who'd allegedly been deceived and insurance agents
who'd allegedly had their clients stolen. They later added Bain
Capital to the ranks of the defendants. One woman in
Texas alleged in the lawsuit that she'd been switched at
least twenty two times without her consent by various brokers,
including Enhance, after she responded to a cash card ad.

(30:45):
All the defendants denied the accusations. The allegations reverberated throughout
the industry, where the misleading ads had been something of
an open secret. Soon after the suit was filed, former
Enhance agents say they were told to gather at the
call center for a meeting with a lawyer by his side.
Hermann told everyone they had nothing to worry about. Within

(31:07):
a few weeks, though he'd stepped down as CEO. He
sold his three million dollar house near Enhance's office in December.
This March, Hermann posted on Instagram that he was retiring
his at moneymat three O five username to show up
more professional edge. The following month, he Enhanced, Bain and
Bowski settled the lawsuit. Fatchiabene, the Enhanced spokesman, says the

(31:31):
company paid a deminimous amount funded almost entirely by our
corporate insurance coverage to make the meritless case go away.
Ryan Lairirr, an attorney for Bowski, says his client denied
all wrongdoing and is pleased to be moving on true coverage,
said in a May twenty seven court filing that it
had also reached a settlement on undisclosed terms. Enhance has

(31:53):
shut its Fort Lauderdale headquarters and now operates out of
a smaller office across the state in Clearwater. The a
new office has no armed guards. According to someone who's visited,
Enhance Health helps millions of Americans access affordable, quality healthcare plans,
and we will soon be announcing a significant expansion of
our offerings. Facibene says the free money ads did help

(32:16):
boost Obamacare enrollment. The total number of insured people jumped
by about sixty seven percent to twenty million during Biden's term.
Both Biden and Harris bragged about the increase during their
presidential campaigns. The federal agency that oversees health insurance, the
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, hasn't sanctioned Enhance or

(32:37):
any other large call centers, even though it received more
than two hundred and seventy thousand complaints in twenty twenty
four from people who say they were either switched to
or enrolled in plans without their consent. The agency declined
to provide any of the complaints or to comment. As
of last year, though, federal regulators have stopped allowing agents
to switch a new customer's insurance directly through the computer system. Instead,

(33:02):
they have to ask customers to do it themselves or
get on a conference call with the government representative. Regulators
have also proposed requiring customers to provide at least a
token payment for a new plan, making it more likely
they'll understand their buying something and not just signing up
to receive cash. But the rooms need to keep selling,
Some are pushing new types of junk insurance. According to

(33:25):
people in the industry. They expect demand for low cost,
low quality plans to grow during the Trump administration, which
has talked about creating more exemptions to Obamacare rules. Others
are still using the free money ads. Ronald Nolan, president
of Health Agents for America, the trade group, says regulators
have failed to punish the agencies responsible for the problem.

(33:48):
They haven't been stopped, Nolan says, they haven't been slowed down.