Gradmed: Spending Your Insurance Dollars Wisely

Since my previous post on how exploitative, dishonest, and useless GradMed Health Insurance is, I've had an enormous spike in traffic from the fine folks at GradMed -- since last Friday, they've viewed my blog pages seventy-one times -- have viewed the blog more than four times as much as I have over the same period, an astonishing amount considering that there are only fifty-two pages here -- and spent almost six hours on the site. I've been chatting with them in the comments about the way in which they're negligent in selling a product that even they don't consider a real insurance solution to penniless graduates. They say, "If someone knows that they will need more permanent coverage, many alumni associations sponsor a renewable major medical program through us as well...", neglecting to recognize the fact that everyone needs permanent coverage whether they know it or not, and that the non-permanent coverage they sell only creates pre-existing conditions that are life-long uninsurables.

It didn't occur to me until I was sitting at my desk, procrastinating on my own project, to ask the question: what the hell are these people doing wasting their time at this tiny blog? I mean, look at the drapes. This isn't exactly the Hilton.

So I drilled down into their data a little bit. They found the blog by doing a blogsearch (not a Google search, mind you, but Google's specific search for blogs alone) for "GradMed" and finding my post from there. At that point, the employee that found the site passed it on to another employee, and then spent about the next hour surfing the site and crafting a comment. They checked again at the start of work Monday, and then again about halfway through the day. Since the start of business Tuesday, they stayed on the site continuously until lunch, refreshing or clicking a link at least once every fifteen minutes.

So who is this person? They identified themselves as "Customer Service" in their comment, but it seems clear that one of the things they do on the blog is fighting the war for GradMed on the information front: the IP address that left the comment on my blog is the perpetrator of at least three vandalism reverts on Wikipedia, one of which was an article created to publicize the USI Consulting Group -- GradMed, as far as I can tell, is a subsidiary of USI Insurance Services, a division of USICG.

But none of this is as important as why we care about all this as insurance customers. GradMed/USI doesn't provide care, of course; but they also don't provide insurance. They organize marketing for insurance that they then obtain from state insurers -- they're insurance brokers dealing with alumni associations. But this whole group -- the alumni association, USI, and the insurer -- gets paid with the money you and I send in as premiums. Every billable minute (and all the GradMed access to this site has come during working hours) that they spend promoting, marketing, giving greasy answers to straightforward questions, and making up fake and poorly structured Wikipedia pages is a dollar of your premium money that doesn't get paid in benefits. I am sure that the people at USI consider this good business: I consider it legal embezzlement from America's limited health care resources.

People say that government bureaucracy is inefficient and I agree, it can be -- but it's nowhere near as bad as being a 22 year-old recent graduate, broke, unemployed, and forced to pay for an insurance broker to surf our hooptie blog.

We need a public option to help get the profit motive out of health insurance. The waste and the lies have to stop.