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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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. 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. They haven't been stopped, Nolan says, they haven't been slowed down.

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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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. 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. They haven't been stopped, Nolan says, they haven't been slowed down.