He Bought Health Insurance for Emergencies. Then He Fell Into a $33,601 Trap. ProPublica 2 hrs ago ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. In the spring of 2019, Cory Dowd suddenly found himself without health insurance for the first time. A self-employed event planner, he had just finished a Peace Corps stint that provided health benefits, but he was still more than a year away from starting a graduate program that would provide coverage through his university. So, like countless others in an online world, he went insurance shopping on the internet.