Swifties shower 13-year-old Bucks County girl with love after brain cancer diagnosis
The Brief
13-year-old Lily Tomlinson was diagnosed with DIGP, a terminal brain cancer.
Taylor Swift fans found out on social media and began to send gifts.
Lily is hoping to meet Taylor Swift.
PIPERSVILLE, Pa. - The ultimate Taylor Swift fan is receiving a lot of love from other Swifties in her time of need. Lily Tomlinson is living with terminal cancer and her fellow Taylor Swift fans are making sure the Bucks County teen feels the outpouring support from around the country.
The backstory
Doctors diagnosed Lily Tomlinson in December of last year with DIPG, which is a terminal brain cancer. She finished radiation at Children's Hospital Of Philadelphia and is now at home in Bucks County. Lily and her mom are Taylor Swift fans. Swifties learned of Lily and have surrounded her with gifts and love.
What they're saying
"It's really great. It is amazing. I was diagnosed with something bad, and I thought the rest of my life was going to be bad," said Lily Tomlinson until boxes of Taylor Swift stuff began to arrive. Now almost anything T-Swift you can find in her home.
"Then mom gave me these packages and I said, 'What are these?' And it is like everyone is supporting me through the Taylor Swift merch," she said. "They've lately been sending books, stickers and bracelets. I really appreciate all the bracelets because I like to wear them."
After she was diagnosed with brain cancer, her mom, Kelsey, immediately wanted to do something to help her little girl.
"I was thinking what radiation was gonna look like and silly things like her having a lap blanket, her having a beanie hat. In case she lost hair and wanting to bring some happiness," said Kelsey Tomlinson. She reached out to a Swifty crafting group on Facebook to ask for help with comfort items for her daughter. She had no idea what would come.
"They are overwhelmingly kind and they are really just overwhelming - a genuinely caring group of people," said Kelsey about Swifties.
"We were asked very kindly by the post office to start coming every day because the box was full and then their back room was getting full," she laughed.
Big picture view
Kelsey says Lily finished radiation, is discharged from CHOP and now back at home where she wanted to be and is most comfortable.
"While every case is different, typically with this diagnosis the prognosis is eight months to a year," said Kelsey.
Lily is brave and open about her cancer but is focusing on the things she enjoys, like reading books, listening to Taylor Swift and being outside on the acres of land they live on in Bucks County. She is also happy to finally be able to eat on her own again.
"I like sushi and donuts. Wawa mac n cheese. Wawa mac n cheese is the lightest, fluffiest thing," said Lily. She says her family keeps her going along with Swifties who will stop at nothing to make her feel comforted and even more loved.
"It's helped me realize that other people are going through what I'm going through and that there are people there to help me," said Lily.
What you can do
The family has a GoFundMe and the hashtag #SwiftiesforLily which they hope gets the attention of Taylor Swift.
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Bloomberg
3 days ago
- Bloomberg
Chasing Big Money With the Health-Care Hustlers of South Florida
Listen: Chasing Big Money With the Health-Care Hustlers of South Florida 00:00 36:33 ✕ 'Hi guys, it's Taylor Swift. Remember those stimulus checks? Well, there's a new thing going viral.' If you were poor and online last year, the ads were inescapable: flashing images of cash and Amazon boxes, narrated by AI-faked celebrities such as Swift, podcaster Joe Rogan or game-show host Steve Harvey. Each described a secretive government program that handed out money—all you had to do was ask. 'They're giving out $6,400 to anyone who makes the call,' intoned a fake Dr. Phil. 'If you don't act now, you're basically throwing away $6,400,' said a shirtless rendering of misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate as he tossed something at the camera. 'That's just stupid.' Health-Care Hustlers This story is the second in a series about the shady side of health-care telemarketing. Part One: A Former TV Writer Found a Health-Care Loophole That Threatens to Blow Up Obamacare The ads were so pervasive that the administration of then-President Joe Biden had to deny the existence of a secret stimulus program. The government was offering valuable insurance subsidies, but not any kind of cash card and certainly not $6,400. That didn't stop the ads. The news outlet 404 Media was able to find hundreds of them, which had been viewed more than 195 million times on YouTube alone before being taken down. The ads were deceptive, but they weren't trying to con people out of their money—at least not directly. The goal was to sign them up for actual government-subsidized health-insurance plans, whether they wanted them or not. People responding to the ads were routed through a network of middlemen to call centers, many of them in South Florida. Telemarketers there would wave off questions about cash giveaways and sign up customers for health insurance instead, sometimes without their knowledge. The plans were free after federal subsidies, but they nevertheless upended many lives. Some people were switched off their old plan without their knowledge, finding out only when they were turned away by a doctor who didn't accept their new coverage. Others had to repay subsidies they hadn't actually qualified for. Hundreds of thousands of people complained to federal regulators that they'd been duped. One of the largest call centers selling the plans was outside Fort Lauderdale, in a three-story building flanked by palm trees and guarded by hulking men wearing body armor and carrying assault rifles. The Batmobile-esque motor trike belonging to the boss was often parked outside. Flush with cash, he commissioned a diamond-encrusted necklace with a saucer-size pendant in the shape of interlocking M's, for his nickname: Money Matt. Listen to The Big Take podcast: Telemarketers' New Trick to Sell Bare-Bones Health Plans His business, Enhance Health LLC, was in his telling one of the most prolific brokers of Affordable Care Act-compliant health plans in the country, collecting more than 1 million signups in 2023 alone. Money Matt, whose real name is Matt Herman, wasn't the operation's main financial backer, nickname notwithstanding. That was Bain Capital LP, the Boston-based private equity firm, which had staked him $75 million to create Enhance. As chief executive officer, Herman directed much of that cash to a former electronic dance music promoter turned online marketing guru, Brandon Bowsky, who connected him with internet advertisers. Together they turned the dull business of selling health insurance into a wild get-rich-quick scheme. The song opens with a woman panting suggestively over a staccato keyboard beat. 'Unnnhhhhhh, Money Matt,' she moans. Then Herman comes in. 'You know there's money in the building when I walk in this motherf---er,' he blusters. The track, Hate Us, was released in April 2023. Herman, then 37, had long wanted to be a hip-hop mogul, and with Enhance's profits he could at least act the part. He's tall and buff, with a beard so closely cropped it looks painted on. On Instagram, he amassed more than 1 million followers with photos of his jealousy-inducing lifestyle: his Bentley, Lamborghini and McLaren; his private jet flights, race-car team and parties with Paris Hilton, Rihanna and Fat Joe. He was also prone to posting hustle-bro aphorisms. In 2023 he shared a photo of himself wearing a suit and blue tie, shaking Biden's hand. Under it, he wrote, 'In order to become the 1%, you must do what the other 99% won't.' During a phone interview, Herman comes off much less brash. He defends his work at Enhance, saying that any misleading ads were the work of 'external vendors' and that he stopped doing business with anyone he caught making them. He says he reported some of those vendors to regulators but can't get into the details. 'I am proud of the work our team did to deliver real coverage to millions of Americans and to operate responsibly,' he adds later on in an email. 'Healthcare is a right and no American should be taken advantage of by predatory actors.' Before he hooked up with Bain Capital, Herman was just one of many hustlers trying to sell health insurance in South Florida. There are hundreds of call centers for this purpose around Fort Lauderdale alone. People who work there refer to them as 'rooms' and say they live up to the shady reputation that Florida has had at least since Charles Ponzi, on the lam after the demise of his namesake scheme, set up shop there a century ago and started pitching swampland as prime real estate to unsuspecting investors. The South Florida rooms tended to push what health-policy experts call junk insurance—cheaper, noncomprehensive coverage that often leaves customers stuck with giant bills. The sales pitch was generally that the insurance would cover almost anything, but in fact it covered almost nothing, according to Matt Panzer, a former salesman who worked early in his career at a room with Herman. Each sale generated hundreds of dollars in commissions. 'These terrible plans only benefit the agents,' Panzer says. 'Most of the people we sell to are broke. They're scraping together their last dollars, and it doesn't do anything for them.' By the time Herman was in his early 20s, he was in charge of his own sales team, according to two of its former salesmen. They say they worked out of a warehouse behind a strip club north of Miami, tricking customers by passing off junk insurance as major medical coverage. 'We're assassins, we're real killers on the phone,' recalls Gary McDonald, one of the former salesmen. 'It doesn't take us long to gain someone's trust.' McDonald says he dealt heroin and worked as a pimp before getting into insurance. He remembers spending lunch breaks with his sales colleagues at the strip club ('for their free wings'). But unlike others in the business, who'd blow their money on partying and drugs, McDonald says, Herman was focused solely on getting ahead. In a book McDonald self-published about his experiences in the industry, he describes Herman as possessing an almost preternatural confidence. 'I've rubbed shoulders with a lot of cocky, narcissistic, sure of themselves motherf---ers before, but nobody on the level of Matt Herman,' McDonald wrote in the book, Buyers Are Liars: The Untold Stories of Downlines. (A 'downline' in industry jargon is a smaller brokerage that sells on behalf of a larger one. Herman disputes McDonald's claims but declines to discuss the details. A lawyer for Enhance said in an email that McDonald 'seems more interested in producing shock value than verifiable and reliable substance.') After Donald Trump became president in 2017, his administration loosened insurance rules to make it easier to offer cheaper, skimpier plans, and the South Florida brokers seized the opportunity. A company called Health Insurance Innovations started selling junk insurance on a massive scale. Herman brokered deals between the company and Florida rooms. But in 2018 the Federal Trade Commission started investigating whether it was using deceptive practices, putting a chill on the entire junk insurance business. The company, which later changed its name to Benefytt Technologies Inc., eventually paid a $100 million fine to the FTC over what the regulator called its 'sham' insurance; one top broker was convicted of fraud last year and sentenced to 25 years in prison. (Herman wasn't an employee of Health Insurance Innovations and wasn't a defendant in either case. In the phone interview, he says it isn't fair to call the plans 'junk' and denies misleading anyone about them. Outside of open-enrollment periods, he says, the plans were the only option for many customers. 'It's not the greatest coverage, but it's better than having nothing.') By 2021, Herman was promoting a night club in Miami, still brokering deals between insurers and rooms, and looking for his next big thing. That's when Bain came along. 'All of life is manipulation. Social engineering is, like, the most basic thing as a human' Co-founded by Mitt Romney before he ran for office, Bain Capital is one of the most prestigious names in private equity, with $185 billion in assets. In 2021 it hired Matt Popoli, an executive with long experience in insurance finance, to raise a $1 billion fund for insurance investments. One area Popoli wanted Bain to get into was call centers, but the company needed an expert to facilitate the play. An executive at a Bain-owned company knew Herman and made introductions. Bain ended up buying Herman's brokerage business for $9 million, according to a person with knowledge of the deal who requested anonymity because the terms were private. But the company had bigger plans for Herman. It formed Enhance Health, put up the cash and named him CEO. The deal was the first for Popoli's insurance fund. The original plan was for Enhance to sell Medicare Advantage plans, which are privately managed alternatives to traditional insurance for retirees. The market was growing fast, and Enhance's pitch was that it could help customers find the best plans from a confusing array of options. Then it would earn money from the monthly commissions the insurers paid. 'We like the economics of the business,' Popoli told the Wall Street Journal in November 2021. (A spokeswoman for Bain and Popoli declined to comment for this story.) The Medicare Advantage strategy proved challenging. It was hard to find new customers, and many of the ones Enhance did land would get pitched by other telemarketers and switch plans soon after. The company was losing money, according to a former Enhance executive who requested anonymity to discuss internal matters. Luckily, Herman had a connection elsewhere in the South Florida insurance rooms who'd found plans that were easier to sell: Bowsky, the marketing expert. In his own telling, Bowsky had hit rock bottom when he discovered the South Florida rooms. The worst moment came around 2016. He was living in his Honda Civic, so broke that he stole a dinner roll from Walmart, he said on the Digital Social Hour, one of several podcasts on which he's told his life story. On the same episode, he recalled being raised in a family of salespeople and learning, by the time he was 3, how to manipulate others. 'All of life is manipulation,' Bowsky said. 'Social engineering is, like, the most basic thing as a human.' His peripatetic career honed his ability to persuade people to do things they probably shouldn't. On the podcasts, he described hustling for real money in online games such as RuneScape, recruiting models for BangBros porn videos and selling 'a ton of drugs.' Bowsky said he started selling health insurance after seeing Craigslist ads dangling pay as high as $4,000 a week. Florida state business records show that, like Herman, he distributed plans for Health Insurance Innovations. Bowsky recalled rising quickly through the ranks to become the manager of a large call center, then starting his own small one. He sold the room to Enhance not long after it was founded, helping Herman get his operation off the ground, according to a filing in an unrelated lawsuit. The room had been a sideline for Bowsky. By then he was focused on a different aspect of the call center business known as lead generation. Lead generators place ads on Google or social media promising to help people find the best health plan. Anyone who responds to the ad is redirected to a call center, which pays a fee to the lead generator for each prospect. Bowsky's company, Minerva Marketing, acted as a middleman, paying the people who placed the ads for each call they generated and reselling those prospects to call centers. Minerva also made some ads itself. In 2021, Bowsky realized lead generators were ignoring a big new market. That year, as part of its response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Biden administration had boosted subsidies for Obamacare, making plans free for potentially millions more people who hadn't previously been able to afford health insurance. The plans didn't pay big commissions, but rooms could still make money if they sold enough of them. All Bowsky had to do was find call centers to try it out. 'Shit, I gotta find somebody who likes to sell poor people,' he recounted in 2023 on a podcast called The Affiliate Marketing Show. He spent months working to persuade Florida room owners to give his new leads a shot. Most weren't interested, he said, but Herman and Enhance were game to try. How the deepfake ads entered the picture is unknown. No one Bloomberg Businessweek spoke with for this story could pinpoint their origins. They're generally posted by fly-by-night operators who leave little trace. One person who worked for a US-based company that made some, including ones depicting Biden and Steve Harvey, remembers the ads being prevalent by late 2022. The man, who requested anonymity because he still works in the business, says they were based on a kernel of truth—on average, people who receive Obamacare subsidies get a discount on their insurance of about $500 a month. But the promise of free insurance alone didn't generate clicks. Advertisers competed by making their ads more and more misleading. 'The only ads that make money are like, 'Hey you get a $6,400 flex card,'' the man says. He recalls selling leads to Bowsky's Minerva, which he says they resold to call centers. Bowsky didn't respond to questions for this story. But a lawsuit he filed against one advertiser says that the terms of Minerva's contract prohibited misleading ads and that the company cut off the advertiser after seeing a proposed ad touting a 'spending card.' And Bowsky has criticized competitors for using false advertising. 'You've got guys that are running crazy, aggressive, borderline free-money ads,' Bowsky said on The Affiliate Marketing Show in 2023. 'It drives my costs up, and it doesn't look good for the industry.' But a former sales manager who worked at a downline affiliated with Enhance that bought leads from Bowsky, and who requested anonymity to avoid angering others in the insurance business, says almost all the prospects his call center got from Minerva expected cash cards. In an internal Minerva group chat that was quoted in a separate lawsuit, an employee joked about it, saying, 'EVERYONE thinks they're getting money… Which they are… In the form of a subsidy… Lmao.' Eliakim Brown, a former sales agent at an Enhance-affiliated call center that also bought leads from Minerva, says prospects would regularly mention seeing ads featuring celebrities. 'I saw the ad with Andrew Tate. I want that money,' Brown recalls more than one client asking. Armed with Bowsky's leads, Enhance's call center was buzzing. Herman hired more agents, who needed more leads. 'We kind of scaled them to the moon,' Bowsky later recalled of Enhance. A former Enhance executive, who asked for anonymity because speaking about a former employer might affect job prospects, says that at times in 2022 the company's payments to Bowsky reached $1 million a week. By then, Enhance's office was packed with hundreds of agents fielding calls on headsets in their cubicles. More than a dozen former employees Businessweek interviewed said almost all the callers were looking for cash cards, not insurance. Top performers made as much as $5,000 a week. A barber who carried his clippers in a Louis Vuitton fanny pack would come by to cut Herman's hair. Less successful agents would smoke weed in the parking lot. As one of the former employees put it, 'Bro, it's Florida.' The armed guards were hired after an employee who'd been fired threatened to come back and shoot up the office, according to Herman. The guards ended up intercepting other disgruntled workers who really did try to bring in guns, he says. 'It became a common thing. We arrested several people with guns on-site.' One of the former agents, Andrew Lara, says fast money was what drew him to an Enhance downline. He was 21, still living with his mother and working at another call center, when he heard that top agents at Enhance could earn $3,000 a week. The gig seemed easy enough. All he had to do was answer the phone and sign up callers for health insurance. He soon noticed, though, that most of his callers were asking about some kind of stimulus program. One was particularly insistent, saying he'd seen an ad with Steve Harvey urging people to call and get the money. Scrolling through social media later that day, Lara saw the ad for himself. 'I've been telling you guys for months to claim this free $6,400,' Harvey appeared to say, wagging his finger. Lara could tell it was fake. He remembers asking his boss how to handle the issue and being told to deflect questions about free cash and sign up the callers for insurance instead. 'We weren't allowed to say they were going to get it, and we sure as hell weren't supposed to say they weren't,' Lara says, sipping a Sprite at a taqueria in Fort Lauderdale. 'You have to throw away a little bit of your morality.' Lara says he knew it wasn't right but felt conflicted because he wanted to earn money to help his family. He also made enough to buy his dream car, an Infiniti Q60, and move out of his mother's house. He convinced himself that even if customers were being misled, signing them up for free health care was harmless. 'The way I made my peace with it, some of these people don't have health insurance,' he says. 'At least I'm getting them something to help them.' Herman says the company trained agents to be honest, not deceptive, and those who were caught misleading customers were fired. 'We probably terminated more agents given how big we were than anybody in the country,' he says. Michael Faccibene, a spokesman for Enhance, says that the idea almost all callers wanted cash cards is 'demonstrably false' and that the company required anyone it bought leads from to conduct themselves ethically. Lead vendors caught violating the rules were blacklisted and reported to regulators, he adds. 'Our rigorous policies around enrollment have always required that lead vendors conduct themselves ethically in full compliance with the law,' Faccibene says. 'Whenever we received any incoming calls asking about cash cards, our policy was to ensure that callers understood they were enrolling in health insurance, and they were referred to the health-plan carriers who would have the accurate information about what they were offering.' The ads themselves, Faccibene points out, were made by companies Enhance didn't own or control. Former employees say the rules left room for maneuvering. Some insurers do in fact offer cash rewards of a few hundred dollars through wellness programs, though not cash cards worth thousands of dollars. Instead of setting callers straight, they recall, they would wave off questions about giving away money by saying the carrier would have the details. 'Half the time they didn't even know they were signing up for insurance,' says Jason Horton, who worked in Enhance's customer retention department and would field complaints from people who were angry they hadn't received cash cards. 'It's crazy to say, but it's true.' Some people who called Enhance already had ACA-compliant health insurance, which they would lose if they signed up for a new plan, even unknowingly. An unexpected change in coverage could leave customers unable to visit their preferred doctors or losing money they'd paid toward their old deductible. One woman from Georgia wrote in a 2024 complaint to the Better Business Bureau that she'd had to put off surgery to fix a detached retina after Enhance switched her to a plan with a deductible she couldn't afford. Another person from Georgia complained of signing up to get free cash and being surprised to find instead that their insurance policy had been switched. 'These guys are nothing but CROOKS who TRICK people,' the person wrote in their complaint. 'I was STUPID to believe them!!' To qualify for the subsidized insurance Enhance was pitching, callers generally had to earn at least $15,000 a year. Those who made less should have been referred to Medicaid, the government's insurance program for the poor. Instead, some former agents say, they would coach callers to put on their applications that they planned to earn at least $15,000 in the coming year and sign them up anyway. An unemployed caller would be asked if they thought they might be able to get a job. The agents say they didn't explain that, when the customers filed their tax returns for the year, they'd face penalties if they hadn't actually earned enough money to qualify for Obamacare subsidies. Enhance was structured so that many of its sales managers ran independent companies—the so-called downlines. Some worked in-house, others ran call centers nearby. But all were supervised by Enhance's quality-assurance department, according to people familiar with the matter. Many of the managers had come up in the Florida rooms. Others had more unusual résumés. One was a 6-foot-6, 330-pound former bodyguard. Another ran popular celebrity gossip accounts on social media. The jeweler who'd made Herman's Money Matt necklace, Johnny Dang, became a manager too. 'You want to make big money? Text me,' Dang said in a recruiting video he posted on Instagram, holding up a big chain outside Enhance's headquarters. (Dang didn't respond to requests for comment.) McDonald, the former employee who wrote about his experiences working for Herman, recalled in a sequel to Buyers Are Liars that he was shocked when he first arrived at Enhance's shiny new office and saw so many people from his old downline days there. 'All those crooked ass motherf—ers under one giant umbrella,' McDonald wrote in Buyers Are Liars 2: American Greed. He says Herman recruited him to run teams of agents who canvassed malls and went door to door in poor neighborhoods to sign up customers. McDonald remembers that his field agents would hand out $20 Subway or Burger King gift cards to encourage people to enroll. The plan worked so well that he was soon managing 150 people and making $10,000 a week, he says. He was fired after some of his field agents signed up homeless people who didn't actually earn enough to qualify, he says, adding that there's no way it could have been his fault, because he was in jail for driving under the influence when the problematic signups happened. McDonald wasn't the only one who'd been earning a large paycheck. Herman's terms were extremely favorable for the downline managers. One of them says a single agent could generate $6,000 a day in commissions. A former employee recalls a 19-year-old manager bragging about being able to afford private jet flights. The 23-year-old son of Bain's Popoli secured a downline, too, according to people with knowledge of the matter. 'It turned into literally thievery. South Florida can ruin anything' Enhance's growth helped Popoli finish raising Bain's $1 billion insurance fund. New Mexico's state employee pension fund committed $60 million in 2023, after officials were given a pitch that mentioned Enhance's success and said Bain was targeting 20% annualized returns. The California Public Employees' Retirement System put in $125 million. Bain also cited Enhance's hiring of minorities as an example of its investments in diverse communities, writing on its website that 'Enhance Health's rapid success has proven it's possible to do well by doing good.' Enhance's success was also allowing Herman to live out his dreams of celebrity, captured in a stream of posts on his @MoneyMatt305 Instagram feed. At the company's Christmas party in 2022, the rappers Jim Jones and Fabolous performed. A few months later, Herman sat next to Floyd Mayweather Jr. at a press conference promoting a fight with John Gotti III, the mob boss's grandson. (After Mayweather beat Gotti in a controversial decision, guards wearing Enhance hats got into an arena-clearing scuffle with Gotti's entourage.) In July 2023, after an Enhance-sponsored team won a Nascar race in Chicago, Herman celebrated in the winner's circle, then posted a photo of himself on a private jet. The next month he posed for a picture with Vice President Kamala Harris at a party to celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. And that November, Herman helped sponsor an awards show in Los Angeles. When he took the stage in a Louis Vuitton dinner jacket, the comedian Tiffany Haddish looked him up and down. 'You got a wife? Mmm hmm,' Haddish said. 'Lookin' like a snack!' Herman says the sponsorships weren't about self-aggrandizement. Instead, they were part of a plan to move away from paid digital marketing, which had proven to be rife with misleading ads, and find other ways to reach low-income consumers. 'The digital ads were the problem,' he says. 'You have to figure out other solutions.' A former Enhance executive says the company stopped doing business with Bowsky in late 2023, though not because of any misconduct. By then, Enhance wasn't Bowsky's only client. His reputation for marketing Affordable Care Act plans had grown to the point that other lead generators were calling him 'the King of ACA.' He began driving a $1 million blue-and-white Bugatti Veyron and bought a mansion in Las Vegas, decorating the exterior with a brightly colored, geometric mural. The Las Vegas Review-Journal said the house looked like 'a lava lamp had a baby with a box of crayons.' As word spread around South Florida about the money to be made in Obamacare, the competition for signups became increasingly cutthroat. Some brokers at other agencies realized they didn't need to talk to customers to earn a commission. The online portal they used allowed them to switch someone's insurance with only their name, address and birth date, according to several brokers familiar with the activity. Data released by federal regulators shows that policies were switched by the tens of thousands. 'It turned into literally thievery,' says one health-insurance call center executive who asked not to be identified because he does business with some of the people involved. 'South Florida can ruin anything.' When it came time for the annual open-enrollment period, Enhance fought back. Several former employees say the company assigned a team to go through the computer system, find customers who'd left and switch them back. Jimmy Fitzsimmons, who worked on that team for a few months, says his group switched thousands of people a day, without speaking to any of them. 'I kinda felt like from the beginning it was just wrong,' he says. 'I kept getting told and trained that these guys are already approved to be reenrolled this year.' (Enhance wrote in response to one complaint filed with regulators that the customers consented to being reenrolled when they originally signed up. The company didn't respond to questions about policy switching.) Agents across the country started noticing their customers disappearing, according to the trade group Health Agents for America. John Stanton, an independent insurance broker in Mesa, Arizona, says Enhance swapped the plans of several of his clients. When he wrote to the company to complain about one of the switches, Enhance wrote back saying it had spoken to the client. Stanton says the man was in a coma at the time. In January 2024 a man who'd had his policy switched by another brokerage, TrueCoverage LLC, contacted a team of class-action lawyers. The lawyers, Jason Doss and Jason Kellogg, had grown accustomed to tips like this after winning a $27.5 million settlement for people who'd allegedly been scammed by Health Insurance Innovations. They didn't think much of it at first. Then, a week or so later, an agent who'd recently left his job at TrueCoverage contacted them and said the company was involved in misconduct. Two leads suggested to Doss and Kellogg that something was up. They put out a press release saying they were investigating TrueCoverage for allegedly misleading consumers with deceptive ads that offered cash cards, and tips started rolling in. Some of them were about Enhance instead. (TrueCoverage didn't respond to a request for comment.) Some days, Doss recalls, he'd line up back-to-back meetings with agents on park benches or at Starbucks coffee shops around Fort Lauderdale. 'There are people who are tired of the unlawful conduct, who are good agents or good folks who happen to work in maybe a bad place,' he says. Several of them signed affidavits describing what they'd seen. That April, Doss and Kellogg sued Enhance, Herman, Bowsky and TrueCoverage, seeking damages on behalf of consumers who'd allegedly been deceived and insurance agents who'd allegedly had their clients stolen. They later added Bain Capital to the ranks of the defendants. One woman in Texas alleged in the lawsuit that she'd been switched at least 22 times without her consent by various brokers, including Enhance, after she responded to a cash-card ad. All the defendants denied the accusations. The allegations reverberated throughout the industry, where the misleading ads had been something of an open secret. Soon after the suit was filed, former Enhance agents say, they were told to gather at the call center for a meeting. With a lawyer by his side, Herman told everyone they had nothing to worry about. Within a few weeks, though, he'd stepped down as CEO. He sold his $3 million house near Enhance's office in December. This March, Herman posted on Instagram that he was retiring his @MoneyMatt305 username to show a 'more professional edge.' The following month, he, Enhance, Bain and Bowsky settled the lawsuit. Faccibene, the Enhance spokesman, says the company paid 'a de minimis amount funded almost entirely by our corporate insurance coverage' to make the 'meritless' case go away. Ryan Lehrer, an attorney for Bowsky, says his client 'denied all wrongdoing' and is pleased to be moving on. TrueCoverage said in a May 27 court filing that it had also reached a settlement, on undisclosed terms. Enhance has shut its Fort Lauderdale headquarters and now operates out of a smaller office across the state in Clearwater. The new office has no armed guards, according to someone who's visited. 'Enhance Health helps millions of Americans access affordable, quality health-care plans, and we will soon be announcing a significant expansion of our offerings,' Faccibene says. The free-money ads did help boost Obamacare enrollment: The total number of insured people jumped by about 67%, to 20 million, during Biden's term. Both Biden and Harris bragged about the increase during their presidential campaigns. The federal agency that oversees health insurance, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, hasn't sanctioned Enhance or any other large call centers, even though it received more than 270,000 complaints in 2024 from people who say they were either switched to or enrolled in plans without their consent. (The agency declined to provide any of the complaints or to comment.) As of last year, though, federal regulators have stopped allowing agents to switch a new customer's insurance directly through the computer system. Instead, they have to ask customers to do it themselves or get on a conference call with a government representative. Regulators have also proposed requiring customers to provide at least a token payment for a new plan, making it more likely they'll understand they're buying something and not just signing up to receive cash. But the rooms need to keep selling. Some are pushing new types of junk insurance, according to people in the industry. They expect demand for low-cost, low-quality plans to grow during the Trump administration, which has talked about creating more exemptions to Obamacare rules. Others are still using the free-money ads. Ronnell Nolan, president of Health Agents for America, the trade group, says regulators have failed to punish the agencies responsible for the problem. 'They haven't been stopped,' Nolan says. 'They haven't been slowed down.'
Newsweek
4 days ago
- Newsweek
Mom Feels Self-Conscious About Hair—Then Sees Portrait Her Daughter Drew
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. You can always count on kids to unintentionally point out your insecurities. Take Rachel, 43, for example. She was already feeling self-conscious about her thinning hair when her 7-year-old daughter Lily handed her a portrait. The drawing featured a bald-headed stick woman with squiggly lines coming from the ears—meant to represent curls. It didn't take long for the clip to go viral on TikTok, amassing 1.7 million views on Rachel's account (@nhmama781). "When I saw the drawing, I thought it was funny," Rachel, from New Hampshire, told Newsweek. "I know she didn't draw it with the intention of hurting my feelings. Kids are brutally honest, and I feel like I'm pretty self-aware, so it made me laugh." Two screenshots showing Rachel drinking through a straw and the drawing. Two screenshots showing Rachel drinking through a straw and the drawing. TikTok/@nhmama781 Rachel explained that her hair started thinning after becoming a mother. According to the American Pregnancy Association, 90 percent of your hair is actively growing at any given time, while the remaining 10 percent enters a resting phase. Pregnancy and postpartum changes can disrupt this cycle, causing noticeable hair loss. In Rachel's case, the issue was worsened by Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), a condition where cysts develop on the ovaries, often leading to fertility problems. One of its symptoms is hair thinning. "I used to have thick curly hair, and it has thinned considerably over the past decade—since having kids and from PCOS," she explained. While Lily may not fully understand why her mom's hair has changed, she certainly brought some humor to the situation. TikTok Reacts: 'A VIOLATION!' As of now, the May 24 clip has racked up 193,000 likes and over 900 comments. "I laughed before you even showed it—I knew what was coming. A VIOLATION," one user wrote. Another added: "Kids are so innocently SAVAGE." Many viewers chimed in with their own experiences. One person said: "Mine love to draw me fat. All the rest of them get these stick figures on the page and I'm a whole oval with arms and legs." "They draw the most brutally honest portraits. My kid always includes the capillaries in my eyes, and any acne," shared another. What Children's Drawings Say About Their Minds According to a 2011 study analysis, children's drawings can reflect their inner world—emotions, personality, and even challenges they may be facing. Here's what certain features often indicate:
Business Wire
4 days ago
- Business Wire
Orca Bio Appoints Key Executives Including Steve Gavel as Chief Commercial Officer
MENLO PARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Orca Bio, a late-stage biotechnology company committed to transforming the lives of patients through high-precision cell therapy, today announced the appointment of senior leaders to support the company as it advances its lead investigational allogeneic T-cell immunotherapy, Orca-T®, toward potential commercial launch. Steve Gavel has joined Orca Bio as Chief Commercial Officer after most recently serving as Senior Vice President, Global Cell Therapy Commercial Development at Legend Biotech. Orca Bio has also strengthened its broader commercial organization with the addition of several senior leaders with extensive cell therapy experience to oversee Market Access, Commercial Operations and Medical Affairs. In addition to these key commercial appointments, Allison Frisbee has joined Orca Bio as a Senior Vice President, Legal, following roles at Kronos Bio, Jazz Pharmaceuticals and Bristol Myers Squibb, and as outside counsel to life science companies at Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe. Steve Gavel - Chief Commercial Officer Gavel brings over 30 years of experience in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors, with deep expertise in the commercialization of cell and gene therapies having led strategy and execution since the earliest days of the field. 'We are thrilled to welcome Steve to the Orca Bio team. Steve is a cell therapy veteran with a proven track record of building and scaling organizations in preparation for commercialization,' said Nate Fernhoff, Ph.D., Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Orca Bio. 'As we prepare for the commercial launch of Orca-T, Steve brings a perfect combination of background, experience and strategic vision to lead Orca Bio into this next phase of growth and maturation.' At Legend Biotech, Gavel grew and scaled its commercial organization across multiple CAR-T therapies, including leading the successful global launch of Carvykti®, a treatment for patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma. There he oversaw the global commercial development efforts including launch readiness, market access and commercial operations. Prior to Legend Biotech, Gavel led U.S. commercial strategy and development at Celgene (now Bristol Myers Squibb). Before then, he held commercial roles of increasing seniority at companies including Millennium Pharmaceuticals, IMS Health, West Pharmaceutical Services and Discovery Labs. 'I'm honored to join Orca Bio as it prepares to bring its groundbreaking cell therapy to patients with high-risk blood cancers, including acute myeloid leukemia and myelodysplastic syndrome,' said Steve Gavel, Chief Commercial Officer at Orca Bio. 'The company's pioneering team has achieved remarkable progress, and with approximately 500 patients treated on trial to date, the potential of its novel high-precision platform is already being realized. I look forward to joining the company as we work to unlock new opportunities for growth and transform the therapeutic landscape for patients with blood cancer.' Allison Frisbee - Senior Vice President, Legal Frisbee joins with strong experience as a legal and operations leader in the life science industry, with a focus on translating complex legal and regulatory challenges into clear, strategic solutions. Prior to joining Orca Bio, Frisbee served as the Chief Administrative Officer at Kronos Bio, where she oversaw a broad portfolio including Legal, HR, Facilities, IT and Compliance. Before joining Kronos, she held senior legal roles at Jazz Pharmaceuticals and Bristol Myers Squibb. 'I'm thrilled to join the team at Orca Bio and help continue shaping a thoughtful, values-driven legal and compliance function,' said Allison Frisbee, Senior Vice President, Legal at Orca Bio. 'It's a privilege to partner with teams who are not only advancing transformative therapies, but leading with a deep commitment to integrity, accountability and an unwavering commitment to doing what's right for patients.' About Orca Bio Orca Bio is a late-stage biotechnology company developing high-precision cell therapies for the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases. The company's manufacturing platform uses single-cell precision to create proprietary, uniquely-defined products designed to replace a patient's diseased blood and immune system with a healthy one. At Orca Bio, we are on a mission to redefine what's possible for patients by transforming the field of curative allogeneic cell therapy. For more information, visit Trademarks or registered trademarks used in this press release are the property of their respective owners.
