I signed up for health insurance as an individual and I have no idea what’s going on

My COBRA ran out recently, so this week I shopped around for health insurance as an individual for the first time in my life. The whole process was absolutely wild, and everyone ensures me that this is just the way things are done. But it all feels incredibly sketchy, and I have absolutely no idea what’s going on or what the status of my health insurance is. Here’s what happened:

I googled health insurance options in NY, and clicked some of the top results.

nystateofhealth.ny.gov has some quotes, but it won’t let me purchase any of the plans.

In order to see a quote from a website that will actually sell me insurance I needed to plug a bunch of personal information into some wizard, which wouldn’t give me any info unless I also provided a phone number.

I was immediately bombarded with calls that my phone flagged as ‘Scam Likely’.

I answered and hung up on a couple of them. These were all insurance agents from field marketing organizations who apparently bid on the right to call me.

I started talking to one of them, who appeared to be some guy calling from a boiler room in Florida from a random FMO (they said they were from Synergy Insurance Group).

The agent said he was not allowed to email me any written information about any of the policies he was telling me about, and that I he was only allowed to give me information over the phone.

As I was about to hang up, someone claiming to be the floor manager took over the call and immediately starting shitting on the agent I was just speaking to, saying it was only his second day.

I grilled the floor manager and talked to him for over an hour — partially about insurance plans, but also about how this whole convoluted process works. He spoke confidently, was somewhat articulate, and seemed to know what he was talking about. But clearly he could’ve been totally full of shit.

I decided to roll the dice and go with some policy that was suspiciously cheaper than anything else I’d seen. I gave him my card info (assuming I could always file a fraud claim later), but didn’t give him my SSN because it all kind of sounded like bullshit.

I was charged for the first month’s premium and received a welcome email. The email said that I purchased “the True Health 3 plan, from Aegis Health Options”. (Aegis Health Options appears to be an LLC set up 8 months ago by the first agent I spoke with).

The email directs me to mymemberbenefit.com, which appears to be a legit website.

A lot of the documents on mymemberbenefit repeat the name “True Health” with a generic logo. I don’t know what True Health is, and I can’t find any information about it on google.

My digital insurance card also has the logo of First Health Network, which appears to be a subsidiary of Aetna. I called them, and they said to call the plan administrator, which the digital card says is Merchants Benefit Admin. When I called MBA I got a generic and unhelpful recording asking me if I wanted to talk to someone about senior benefits or make a dental claim. This was a dead end.

All of the documents also say that the plan sponsor is “The Vitamin Patch”. The plan overview says Since you are an Affiliate partner of the Vitamin Patch.com, you can enroll in the True Health plan. and The Vitamin Patch.com., sponsor this group health plan.

There’s enough connective tissue here to make me think that this isn’t an outright scam, and that I may, in fact, have some form of health insurance. But something is clearly fucked up here. I have zero idea what my insurance company is sponsoring my plan — it seems like a giant frankenstein mishmash of various corporate entities and products. I also appear to be on the group plan of a company that I don’t work for. I have no way of determining whether any of these websites are legit because most of these legit websites look like scam websites that haven’t been updated in 15 years.

Does any of this make any sense to anyone? How fucked am I on a scale of 1-10?