[Boomer]

Has anyone else whose Medicare supplement is through United Healthcare received a call recently that pops up with United Healthcare on the screen as the caller…..

AND THEN a robot/recording/AI/whatever the hell it is asks if this is (insert YOUR name here) and asks you to say yes or no?

I did not answer and hung up.

My supplement to Medicare is a Plan F from United Health through AARP. AARP publishes a lot of info about scams, so why in the world would this phone call from one of their business partners be designed to look like a scam?

(Please save the knee-jerk AARP bashing because I think overall they do good lobbying for things that affect seniors — working against those who lobby to put us out to sea on the ice-floes or, even worse, take our choice away and throwing us into total privatization with HMOs. (If I want to pay through the nose for my Plan F supplement, I want to keep the right to do that…….

and don’t tell me the promise has been made to “save” Medicare. Yeah, right. Save it for total privatization, by thrusting everyone onto the same kind of plan where insurance companies get to make all the decisions about our health to the tune of putting profit first. Lots of palm-greasing…….

Btw, to those of us women smart enough to not have fallen for, “You would if you loved me,” back in our day of riding in cars with boys, please continue to look between the lines of what you are being told.)

Oh well, I digress this morning, but it is all on the same topic which is about scam calls……

Was that call I hung up on really from United Healthcare? And if it was, why would the thing ask me to answer Yes or No to my name? We are constantly warned not to respond. We all know about the spoofing — or whatever it is called — of phone numbers. So? If that call really was from my United Health supplement plan “people” why did the set-up violate its own warnings about scams on seniors?

Anyway, anybody else getting calls from United Health that start out trying to capture your voice? (I got calls like this several years ago and found out it was actually them about some of the extra benefits of the plan. So? Yeah. This recent call is probably actually them, BUT their approach is so stupid and counter-intuitive that I hung up.)

Boomer