Senator Probes Medicare Plan Distributors on Marketing Tactics

What You Need to Know

The heads of Integrity Marketing, eHealth, GoHealth, SelectQuote and Willis were asked about their lead-generation efforts.
The letters do not indicate awareness of the effects of new Medicare plan marketing rules.
An earlier campaign directed at the private placement life sector has not brought up changes in industry rules.

A lawmaker who helps set health insurers’ tax rates has warned large Medicare Advantage plan marketers that he is looking at ways to limit high-pressure, potentially deceptive Medicare plan lead-generation campaigns.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, announced Tuesday that he has sent letters to the heads of five large Medicare plan marketers to ask them how their “companies use insurance agents, lead generators and other data to target, market to and direct seniors toward certain Medicare Advantage plans.”

Wyden acknowledged in an announcement about the letters that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has imposed new rules on Medicare plan third-party marketing organizations, but, in the letters themselves, he did not indicate any awareness of how the new rules have affected the marketing efforts.

His questions focus on data from 2018 and 2022, before most of those rules took effect.

What it means: The high-level interest in Medicare plan marketing eventually could change the way that health insurers and third-party marketing organizations market to clients. The letters could also produce an interesting new public Medicare plan marketing data source.

But Wyden has announced other volleys of letters before, and it’s not clear what effects those have had.

He has sent letters to insurance and wealth advisors about private placement life insurance policies, or arrangements that ultra-high-net-worth individuals and families can use to obtain custom-tailored life insurance arrangements to manage and, potentially, reduce their U.S. federal tax bills.

At this point, the Wyden private placement life insurance letters have not led to changes in the rules governing those arrangements.

The controversy: Medicare provides health coverage for 66.5 million people who are ages 65 or older, who are disabled or who have severe kidney disease.

The private insurers that run Medicare Advantage plans provide an alternative to original Medicare for 32.5 million of the Medicare enrollees.

Medicare plan marketers have always faced extensive agency rules, but large lead-generation organizations caught consumers’, consumer groups’, traditional insurance agents’ and regulators’ attention in 2020 and 2021.

The lead-generation giants responded to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic-period shelter-at-home efforts by organizing television advertising campaigns encouraging people eligible for Medicare to call for help with signing up for Medicare.

Managers of some high-profile Medicare marketing campaigns had the consumers talk to sales agents in their own call centers. In other cases, marketing campaign managers passed the sales leads on to independent agents and brokers.

The agency began drafting and finalizing a series of sales regulations in 2022. The current rules classify all outside Medicare plan marketers as third-party marketing organizations, require the third-party marketing organizations to record calls and provide standardized disclaimers, and keep agents who address large groups of consumers at educational meetings from setting Medicare sales appointments with the consumers immediately following the meetings.