MEGA Insurance and NASE

Here is a great way to sell health insurance to overwhelmed newly self-employed people: Start up a cover association with a name like "National Association for the Self Employed" or "Alliance for Affordable Services", so people will think they're getting a great "group" benefit. And recruit naive, new agents by the truckload so they won't know what they're selling.
That's just the beginning. When I first started in the health insurance industry, I worked for MEGA. They recruited about 20 new agents per week; none of us had a clue about health insurance yet. They brainwash the recruits by having mandatory weekly meetings where they bash PPO and HMO plans. After a while, I started to catch on and do my own research into the details of all the plans.
This post was mainly to warn any people that have just become self-employed. With all the things that need to be done when starting your own business, it's too much of a whirlwind and health insurance doesn't get the time it deserves. To keep it short, Colorado, like most states, requires that group health insurance not be underwritten on an individual basis. This may sound great at first, but a healthy person is just going to pay about 3 times as much for a group policy compared to an individual/family policy because they are just subsidizing the unhealthy people in the group. Both MEGA, which uses the NASE to pretend it's a "group" plan, and Midwest, which uses the "Alliance for Affordable Services" to pretend it's a group plan, (all of which are owned by UICI) perform underwriting on an individual basis and will not cover pre-existing conditions. If you have a serious health condition and can't get individually underwritten insurance, the best thing to do is get a self-employed group of one policy. Or better yet, join the state risk pool like Cover Colorado. If you see how much policies like this are, you'll see what I mean. But some people don't have a choice.
Want to do some more research on MEGA/NASE/Midwest/Alliance? I'll get you started...
HERE (a very informative article from "The Health Care Blog" - the comments are very helpful too)
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And more, here and here.

I could've written hundreds of pages on the problems with NASE, but the last thing I'll point out is that MEGA/NASE and Midwest/Alliance were each fined $75,000 a couple years ago by the Colorado division of insurance for misleading consumers about their health coverage, among other sales violations. You can read more about that here.