Reuters has a stunner today. The insurance company WellPoint had a policy of targeting its customers with fraud investigations if they were diagnosed with breast cancer, according to federal investigators. The goal: Find a reason to drop their coverage of sick women before big bills started to arrive.
The women all paid their premiums on time. Before they fell ill, none had any problems with their insurance. Initially, they believed their policies had been canceled by mistake. They had no idea that WellPoint was using a computer algorithm that automatically targeted them and every other policyholder recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The software triggered an immediate fraud investigation, as the company searched for some pretext to drop their policies, according to government regulators and investigators.
Read the entire story here.