An insurance exchange opened last month in Florida, and it’s called “Florida Health Choices,” but it doesn’t offer consumers or small businesses actual health insurance.  Instead, the only products consumers can buy on the site are called “supplemental” insurance products, designed to supplement, but not replace, traditional health insurance. These products don’t meet any of the Affordable Care Act’s requirements to cover a minimum set of benefits or protect people from excessive out-of-pocket costs. They don’t come with the financial assistance available through the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) health insurance marketplaces, and the people who buy them could face significant penalties for failing to meet the ACA’s requirement to maintain minimum essential coverage (often called the “individual mandate”).

In 2008, Florida’s legislature created Florida Health Choices (FHC) to provide small businesses with the state’s own version of a health insurance exchange. The bill was championed by then-state House Speaker Marco Rubio and authorized Florida Health Choices to be a “centralized marketplace” for the sale of health insurance products for small employers. Over the past 6 years, however, this vision has morphed into something else entirely.

Florida Health Choices, which launched in early March after multiple delays, currently offers only a set of discount plans for dental, vision, prescription drug, and telemedicine services. FHC reportedly has plans to expand its offerings to include “limited benefit” insurance (typically plans with low annual limits) in the near future. At this point FHC doesn’t offer actual health insurance or minimum essential coverage as it’s defined under the ACA, and it’s unclear when they will.

In addition, according to news reports, FHC is no longer just for small businesses. Rather, it has targeted Floridians who fall into the state’s Medicaid coverage gap and can’t qualify for financial help on the Marketplace. Yet the alternative coverage offered to them by FHC amounts to little more than a cruel joke. As the Federal Trade Commission has advised, while some medical discount plans provide limited discounts, “others take people’s money and offer very little in return.”

Unfortunately, discount plan providers have been known to take advantage of people’s confusion over new coverage options, selling them products that don’t actually provide the coverage they think they’re getting. For example, after Massachusetts passed its health reform law in 2006, discount medical plans were sold to many unsuspecting consumers as alternative coverage. According to TIME Magazine, several providers were eventually sued by the state for deceptive marketing.

FHC’s marketing materials are careful not to use the terms “insurance,” “coverage,” or “benefits,” and a quick skim of the plans’ components reveal that they don’t cover basic primary or preventive care, maternity, mental health, or hospitalization. But by targeting their marketing efforts towards millions of uninsured Floridians, FHC is clearly hoping to capitalize on people’s confusion over their new rights and responsibilities under the ACA.

The bottom line? Florida state leaders would rather sell millions of their residents junk insurance than offer them common sense, meaningful coverage through a Medicaid expansion.