The Sutter Health Network / Palo Alto Medical Foundation routinely get caught committing widespread insurance fraud.

They also offer products that seem to be junk insurance to me, but I’m not a lawyer.

Here are three examples of their alleged widespread insurance fraud:

https://allaboutlawyer.com/claim-your-sutter-health-settleme...

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/sutter-health-accused...

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/government-intervene...

Some of those suites involve other big providers, like KP. Not sure if any of the healthcare providers around here are reputable at this point.

As someone with a little experience with the 'advertiser side' of Google, they also push junk to their paying clients, using every opportunity to sell terrible, worthless placements to advertisers. Which is to say that the problem is not that 'searchers' are the product, the problem is that Google is not focused on creating value for its counter-parties.

The problem is that these things exist at all.

Omnienshittified: May go down as the most hilarious - yet prescient - new word this century. (In the USA of course.)

Seems worth noting that "sleazy" and "suck their co-religionists into" are (unfounded, as far as I can tell) opinions, "cost the world" is flat-out false and the exact reason why they are an appealing option, and "and leave you high and dry when you or your kids get hurt or sick" is also an unfounded claim. His only citation for any of this is talking about someone who doesn't like morality clauses, but...picked it anyways, presumably because it didn't cost the world?

Some are better than others. I picked the one that looked the most like real insurance and has a >30 year track record of not leaving people high and dry. I've been on it for almost seven years and it's worked out well so far.