Americans Googling Obamacare Are Finding Junk Health Insurance Instead

During open enrollment, ads from telemarketers are crowding out official health exchanges.

November 22, 2025 at 6:00 AM EST

Corrected on November 22, 2025 at 6:45 PM EST

Over the next few weeks, millions of Americans will shop for health insurance online. Many will find comprehensive plans through Affordable Care Act marketplaces like HealthCare.gov. Others will be steered elsewhere — toward insurance products that sound great but don’t provide much coverage.

For many buyers, the trouble starts with a Google search, where the first click on a results page can be the difference between getting the coverage they need — and getting ripped off.

Here’s what can happen:

For consumers, this hodgepodge of official and commercial sites can be confusing. Every year, Americans all over the country file complaints to the Federal Trade Commission, the Better Business Bureau and other consumer review sites, claiming they were misled while shopping for health insurance online.

They report being steered by Alphabet Inc.-owned Google to a commercial website, leading to a phone call with a salesperson. Then they’re talked into buying “limited‑benefit” or short‑term products with little to no coverage — what health policy experts call “junk insurance.” These alternative plans often fail to cover crucial benefits such as hospital stays or emergency-room visits. They may also exclude coverage for preexisting conditions entirely.

In one complaint to the FTC last year, a parent from Coarsegold, California, said their daughter needed weekly allergy shots. Searching Google for health insurance, the parent wrote, they clicked on a link that looked like HealthCare.gov.

The parent entered a phone number on a website and bought a $530-a-month insurance policy from the salesman who followed up, according to the complaint. Months later, the parent learned it was a limited-benefit plan that didn’t meet ACA standards. The family was stuck with bills for multiple allergist visits.

“I am livid!!!!!,” wrote the parent, whose name wasn’t disclosed by the FTC. “My daughter is in the middle of treatment that is now stopped!”

That experience echoes dozens of similar complaints that Bloomberg News obtained from the FTC via public-records requests:

Bloomberg News wanted to better understand how consumers can be misled when searching for health insurance. Google considers its search engine algorithms proprietary information and specific ranking details are rarely publicly disclosed. So, we decided to test the process ourselves.

During the first 10 days of open enrollment — Nov. 1 to Nov. 10 — we ran more than 4,800 Google searches across all 50 states using health-insurance-related terms such as “Obamacare,” “ACA marketplace” and “cheap health plans.”

After adjusting the results for state population, a clear pattern emerged: on Google, official state or federal exchanges take a back seat to for-profit marketing companies. These advertisers are mostly insurance call centers and lead generators — the online middlemen who connect customers with the centers. Official sites appeared as the first result only a quarter of the time, and somewhere in the top three 40% of the time. The marketing companies occupied more than half of the top-three spots.

Health-Care Hustlers

This story is the third in a series about the shady side of health-care telemarketing.

Part One: Health-Care Plans Built on Fake-Job Loophole Threaten Obamacare

Part Two: Celebrity Deepfakes Supercharged a Florida Health-Care Scheme

This might come as no surprise; advertising is what keeps Google search free. When people look for cruise trips or refrigerators, they expect to see ads from companies selling those products.

But health insurance searches are different. Official government marketplaces can help most people get ACA plans, but don’t spend much on ads. Instead, the first links shoppers typically see are from for-profit companies — often imitating official sites — that might steer them toward non-ACA products that are more profitable to sell.

For-Profit Call Centers Dominate Google Search Results

Share of top-three positions on Google search result pages for “health insurance” and similar terms

“Our search ranking systems ensure that official resources rank highly for the vast majority of health insurance queries,” Nate Funkhouser, a Google spokesman, said in a statement. Ads are prominently labeled, he added, and advertisers offering ACA policies are required to prove they’re authorized by state and federal regulators to sell such products.

Funkhouser said Bloomberg used a “questionable methodology” and relied on a tiny fraction of the billions of queries Google handles each day. He said Google removed some ads in response to Bloomberg’s inquiry without specifying which ones.

Still, the results of Bloomberg’s analysis show that official health-care exchanges are rarely the first thing customers will see on Google. More often, they’re the fifth or sixth link on the page. Research shows users are less likely to click on a link that’s labeled as sponsored, but only half of search engine users are able to correctly identify sponsored links.

“We make it clear to users which results are sponsored, so equating ads and organic search results does not reflect the user experience,” Funkhouser said. He also pointed to Google’s use of AI overviews to surface credible information, and said finance-related queries have “an even higher bar for showing supporting information from reliable and trustworthy sources.”

Google’s AI overviews were more likely to point to official sites like healthcare.gov and state exchanges, Bloomberg’s analysis found. However, the AI summaries appeared at the top of the search page less than 20% of the time in our results — more often, they appeared below paid advertisements.

Where Official Insurance Marketplaces Appear in Google Results

Chance of an official site, such as healthcare.gov or a state marketplace, appearing in each of the top 10 spots in Google search results.

Google requires advertisers to accurately represent their services, avoid implying any government affiliation and include disclaimers if they are not official exchanges.

Organic search results and paid advertisements run on different systems. Organic rankings are based on Google’s algorithm, which weighs relevance and page quality. Ads are ranked based on a different system that includes how relevant they are and the amount an advertiser is willing to pay.

Bloomberg’s analysis found that Google’s system showed ads first in a majority of searches, allowing marketers who might steer shoppers toward non-ACA products to crowd out the organic search results that send users to official websites.

“They will let a company who has 5,000 one-star reviews appear as #1 as long as they pay the most,” said Eugene Tolkachev, who runs a call center that’s a top Google advertiser, in an email. The result, he said, is “an unfair marketplace to good actors.”

Google does consider information like consumer reviews and regulatory warnings in determining whether an advertiser is violating its policies, Funkhouser said.

The stakes for consumers during this year’s open enrollment season are particularly high. Out-of-pocket costs for many ACA policyholders are set to more than double next year because of a drop in government subsidies. That could cause the uninsured population to rise by 2.2 million next year, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.

Tolkachev’s company, Acme Health and Life, is based in South Florida, the capital of the health-insurance telemarketing industry. In hundreds of call centers, mostly in and around Fort Lauderdale, salespeople pitch a mix of ACA-compliant plans and less-comprehensive products, such as short-term and fixed indemnity policies.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with selling low-benefit plans, as long as customers understand what they’re buying. Some policymakers and industry professionals say these alternatives fill an important niche, especially for younger, healthier people who don’t expect major medical costs and earn too much to qualify for subsidies. Outside of open-enrollment periods, some consumers also may not be eligible to buy an ACA plan.

Acme strives to sell products that best fit the customer’s circumstances and to ensure they understand what they’re buying, Tolkachev said.

But other South Florida telemarketers have been caught tricking customers into buying low-benefit plans that pay higher commissions. In 2018, the FTC accused Steven Dorfman — a Lamborghini-driving call center boss in Fort Lauderdale — of systematically deceiving customers by promising Obamacare coverage while selling what the government called “sham” insurance. He is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence from a related criminal case.

In 2022, a marketing firm that worked with Dorfman’s call center and dozens of others in the area agreed to pay $100 million in customer refunds after the FTC alleged similar practices.

More recently, the FTC investigated MediaAlpha Inc., historically one of Google’s biggest health-insurance advertisers and a major lead supplier to South Florida call centers. In a court complaint, the agency said MediaAlpha spent millions of dollars on deceptive Google ads that directed consumers to websites mimicking official ACA marketplaces. Those sites then funneled consumers to call centers that sold inferior products, according to the FTC.

The complaint highlighted two sites, obamacare-plans.com and obamacareplans.com, that it portrayed as particularly misleading. SpyFu, a search analytics firm, estimates the two websites together had a monthly Google Ads budget exceeding $1.8 million.

This past August, MediaAlpha agreed to pay $45 million to settle the lawsuit. The company didn’t admit wrongdoing, and its chief executive officer later said “we strongly disagree” with the allegations. MediaAlpha declined to comment further to Bloomberg. As part of the settlement, it also agreed to stop using the “Obamacare” web addresses.

But that hasn’t stopped other advertisers from using similar tactics nor has Google intervened. Among our search results were five websites with “Obamacare” in their names.

“As far as the search terms go, I wouldn’t say it’s misleading… That’s something that people just generally search for,” said John Medina, a partner at Miami-based First Health Solution LLC, which operates ObamaCare-Enroll.org and is an affiliate of the owner of Obamacareplans.org. Medina said his agents sell both limited-benefit plans and ACA policies but always try to serve the client’s best interest.

“Obamacare isn’t an official term by the government,” Medina added. “It’s a term made up by the media.”

That kind of ambiguity around language has long fueled confusion in online health insurance searches. In 2019, Democrat Bob Casey, then a US senator from Pennsylvania, published a report faulting search engines for allowing what he called “health care sabotage,” including permitting private advertisers to use “healthcare.gov” in marketing copy.

In response, Google told Casey’s office it would remove ads that used the term, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

But Bloomberg’s searches found ads using the term, if a user types “healthcare.gov” into the Google search bar. In fact, a search for “healthcare.gov” returns an official site as the top result only a quarter of the time, the data show.

A similar pattern appears with state-run exchanges such as New Jersey’s official marketplace, GetCoveredNJ. When searching for that term online, the first result may be an ad for a similarly named site — GetCoverageNJ.com.

Pennsylvania’s ACA marketplace, known as Pennie, shows the same issue. A Google user in Pennsylvania who searches for “Pennie Pennsylvania” and clicks on the first result might end up here, where the small print at the bottom of the page discloses the company isn’t an official marketplace.

Both the New Jersey and Pennsylvania websites are operated by AIB Inc., a small insurance telemarketing firm based in Pompano Beach, Florida.

The names, ads and website language aren’t misleading, said Marcos Huisman, AIB’s owner, because the company is licensed to sell policies on both states’ exchanges. Huisman said his agents sell only health plans that comply with the Affordable Care Act, though they also offer non-marketplace extras such as vision and dental coverage.

“We’re Pennie-certified agents,” Huisman said. “We literally pull up quotes on the Pennie exchange. That’s what we’re supposed to do.”

But it’s a different story for some larger South Florida telemarketers, squeezed by rising Google ad prices and high overhead, that rely on low-benefit plans to stay afloat, Huisman said.

“These big guys, it’s impossible. They have to scam the shit out of people. They have to. It’s the only way to stay in business.”

“I think Google and the other platforms — when it comes to financial products — need to have a higher level of scrutiny,” said Rob Leathern, an internet privacy and safety expert who has held leadership roles at Meta Platforms Inc. and Google.

Adding more guardrails wouldn’t be difficult, he said. Rather, it’s a question of “how much friction do they want to add?”

Google doesn’t disclose how much of its revenue comes from the US or from specific industries such as health insurance. It earned about $198 billion from search advertising last year.

So what can shoppers do during this enrollment period to make sure they’re buying coverage that actually meets their needs?

“The best advice is just to take your time,” said Kaye Pestaina, a vice president at KFF, an independent health research foundation. “You have to spend some time on HealthCare.gov and get past that initial premium shock and see the big picture of what’s available.”

To stay safe during this open enrollment period, experts and official exchanges recommend the following:

Go directly to official sites. Healthcare.gov is the official federal marketplace and offers tools to help shoppers find their state’s exchange, connect with licensed agents and confirm that a plan covers what they need.

Verify before sharing personal information. Be cautious of sites that urge you to call a phone number or enter sensitive information into an online form. “You can get an estimate without giving your personal information — you can certainly do that on HealthCare.gov,” Pestaina said. “Avoid giving out your information unless you’re ready to enroll and you’re really sure that this is the place you should be.”

Be wary of low premiums. A cheaper monthly premium may come with limited benefits. In some cases, it could indicate an alternative product — such as a short-term health plan, a health-sharing ministry or another type of coverage that isn’t the equivalent of ACA-compliant coverage.

Because navigating health insurance marketplaces can be complex and time-consuming, consumers should seek expert help when needed. “It is buyer beware when you’re out there on the internet,” Pestaina said.

— with assistance from Surya Mattu, Davey Alba and John Tozzi

(Corrects 19th paragraph about AI overviews to remove a reference to sponsored content.)