Health care enrollment robo-calls ‘an epidemic’

“Anna” will not stop calling. She really, really wants to sell you health insurance.

What a lot of consumers really, really want is to smack Anna upside her robo-calling head.

With health insurance open-enrollment season underway, automated phone calls offering Affordable Care Act or other health plans are spiking — and driving many consumers to the brink. California residents may have it worst, because its open-enrollment period is twice as long as in other parts of the country.

“It’s at epidemic levels at this time of year,” said Aaron Foss, founder of Nomorobo, who estimates his spam-call-blocking service, based in Long Island, N.Y., headed off more than 850,000 health-related robo-calls in October alone — nearly five times the interceptions for September.

Nomorobo tracked about 820 different robo-call pitches for health insurance in the last week of October. More than 100 of them were from the robot Anna.

Almost all of these calls are illegal, according to rules published by the Federal Trade Commission in 2009. Many offer skimpy health plans that do not cover what you might need, insurance regulators and consumer advocates say. Others, they say, are downright fraudulent, with unscrupulous insurance “brokers” taking payment and promising insurance that never comes through.

Alice Cave, 62, a retired data analyst from Alexandria, Virginia, who spends winters in Tucson, said she has gotten so many of these calls that she typically will not answer her phone unless she recognizes the number. Recently, expecting a call from a California reporter, she answered her cellphone.

It was “Anne.” (Anna’s robot cousin? Other relatives include “Jordan,” “Allison” and “Mandy,” although variants on Anna remain most prevalent.)

“She was saying, ‘I really need to talk to you — we’ve got deals on health insurance.’ I thought, ‘God, what a crock,’ ” Cave said. “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is. ”

Some fed-up consumers try to stymie robo-callers, with amusing results. Twitter user Jon Heise in June confounded his robot by insisting, after whatever it said, that he was a “meat popsicle.” Eventually, it hung up.

It’s not all fun and games. The California Department of Insurance is investigating health insurance robocalls, said Janice Rocco, deputy commissioner for health policy and reform. In late August, the agency filed a court order against Health Plan Intermediaries Holdings, accusing the Florida company of deceptive and misleading practices in selling “Obamacare” plans that did not comply with the health law.

In this case, the company’s robo-calls featured “Anne,” according to the court order. In its legal response, the company did not admit to the agency’s allegations and denied responsibility.

Under federal law, calls using prerecorded messages are legal only for such things as doctor appointment reminders, flight cancellations, credit card fraud alerts and political candidates. Calls to sell products and services are not.

In a typical robo-call sales pitch, a friendly female voice comes on the line. Sometimes the call appears to originate from major insurers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield or Aetna or from a local number a caller might suppose is a school or neighbor.

Often, the voice will ask the consumer to dial “1” to enroll or “2” to opt out of future calls. Both options can be a trap, experts say.