Colorado Insurance Loves to Deny Babies: Publicity Stunt?
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We have all heard of Balloon boy by now. Claiming your child is stuck on a Balloon is no laughing matter, but it sure does draw media attention. Not only does it draw media attention, but when you are caught, you still get media attention about how much of a scumbag you are.
A similar story to the Fox News story “17-Pound, 4-Month-Old Baby Denied Health Insurance for Being Too Fat” is reported by Care2, this time as “Toddler Too Small for Health Insurance“. The odd similarities don’t stop there, it again points to Colorodo insurance companies, this time a United Healthcare subsidiary. It makes me wonder however, coming back to the balloon boy example…could this just be a publicity stunt?
Although mostly negative, imagine all the interest the media puts into its stories. Imagine the syndication of the articles, the rising organic rankings of a company, especially of a lesser known company such as Rocky Mountain Health Plans, due to media interest. The media is a huge advertising agent when a company is mentioned as a story, good or bad.
Is advertising taking a turn for the worse? Are individuals and companies now expected to do ridiculous things to get media coverage and reap the benefits in the background? Anyone who knows a little bit about Search Engine Optimization knows that content is king, and rankings come from content. When you have an entire media, no, an entire nation talking about your company, creating fresh new content without you even asking and pointing links back to your site, there is no way you can be unsuccessful as a company when you are pushing such a huge amount of traffic to your website.
IFB | November 5th, 2009 at 1:59 am #
This could be a case of all publicity is good publicity but I doubt it.
The one thing that many seem to be conveniently forgetting is that in every state that I have ever heard of there are laws in place that guaranteed that babies will be accepted onto their parents health insurance plan if the parent simply inform the insurance company within the first 30 days after the baby is born.
The real issue here is that the parents were either irresponsible in not having insurance for themselves or they were irresponsible in not taking a few minutes to call up the insurance company within the first 30 days after the baby was born.
If they already have their current insurance they they should have simply added the baby on within the first 30 days like the law allows for guaranteed coverage for babies no matter what.