I know one person who works for a health insurance company, so I asked him about this. He's with a tiny little company, not a big HMO, and said "those fuckers make all of us look like inhuman monsters."
He actually didn't know about the practice, so when I explained it to him he was pretty horrified.

I know someone this happened to, though. Her husband had a heart attack, and they tried to deny care and boot him because he failed to disclose he had been treated for skin cancer 20 years earlier. It was a group plan, though, and amazingly my former company went to the bat for her. (I suspect it only worked because it was a massive multinational corporation, though)

This makes me both furious and sad as all get out.

Oh my God. I am so weak in the face of this kind of report. I don't even know what to do? How do I ensure that I have not unintentionally misrepresented myself? For example, I have had a number of years I've struggled with smoking. There were many years I have been a non-smoker and then been a smoker. Was I asked at some time if I had had nicotine in a certain time period? Many times I can say no, but sometimes I have a lapse. If I get an unrelated disease does this mean they can come back at me and claim I had fraudulently misrepresented myself? Why am I paying this money every month if not for the chance I get sick.

I want to cry. Everything is broken. You never get what you pay for anymore.

I must have been lucky with insurance companies. The only problems I ever had was dealing with the occasional imbecile when I could just hang up, call back, and talk to the next rep who answered.

*puts on insurance hat*

I do not work in Health Insurance, but from my industry understanding, I don't think this is Kosher at all. At best they are big time gaming the system and really exploiting the exclusions language. My insurance company (property and casualty) would not get away with this sort of thing, and most of our business is UNregulated. This makes me, well, sick. I think the type of people represented in this article have real errors and omissions claims against the insurance companies, but probably don't have the means or resources to bring suit. Terrible. I can say that knowingly witholding information/fraud is cause for voiding coverage, but I can't belive all three reps said they wouldn't agree to limit it to that.

I work for a health insurance company in the UK, and I forwarded this article to my manager. She was astounded; that simply would not happen here. Being an American, I'm not surprised, but so very sad.

I work for a health insurance company in the UK, and I forwarded this article to my manager. She was astounded; that simply would not happen here.

And if it did, it would end up with my employer, the dispute-resolution service for the insurance industry (amongst other things), which would tell the insurer in no uncertain terms that it was in the wrong.