What You Need to Know
- Louisiana regulators are seeing a wave of Medicare cold calling.
- They say the callers try to refer Medicare beneficiaries to health insurance agents.
- Bonnie Burns said some of the telemarketing organizations may be based outside the United States.
State insurance regulators may be about to take a hard look at companies that use telemarketing operations to generate Medicare plan leads.
Ron Henderson, a regulator from Louisiana, talked about the issue at a recent online meeting of the Senior Issues Task Force, according to draft meeting minutes posted on the task force section of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ website.
The task force is part of the association.
Henderson is Louisiana’s deputy commissioner of consumer advocacy. He said that Medicare enrollees in Louisiana, including his own mother, have been getting many cold calls from people who are not health insurance agents themselves, but who refer enrollees to agents.
Henderson complained that the marketers and agents switch enrollees into plans that are not necessarily better than the old plans and that, in some cases, are worse.