7 ms·

Ritter, for instance, recently met an insurance executive who always pays for meals with cash because he believes some day that data will be linked to his cover

• noonespecial 13y ago
  How terrifying will it be when the government is the sole provider of said insurance with IRS enforcement of its rules? It will be like the NYC BigGulp ban on a ridiculous scale.
• diminoten 13y ago
  Are they wrong? Did you not just increase their liability by 0.001%? I guess I'm still having a hard time squaring personal responsibility with this idea of complete anonymity. It's not that we shouldn't be able to hide anything, but like the article said, it's just not possible (or even reasonable to expect) to hide everything. Existing in society leaves a footprint, especially in cases like license plates - they're designed to aid in tracking, what's the surprise that they're being used to do exactly that?
  • joosters 13y ago
    Perhaps you're buying alcohol for a party. Or all that fatty food you purchased on your credit card was because you get shopping for a friend. But the anonymous algorithms won't know this, and you will pay for their assumptions. How is that fair? It's little relief to me if these systems are only mostly correct.
    • diminoten 13y ago
      You're focusing on the specific example, rather than the general idea that your purchase history indicates your riskiness, and an insurance company who has that data available to them will adjust your policy based on your behavior. And why shouldn't they? It's the same concept as you indicating whether or not you smoke, how much you drive to/from work daily, how many driving tickets you have, etc. Questions you willfully answer today. We are already accepting of their interest. The only significant difference here is you wouldn't as easily be able to lie, and people who do lead more conservative lives pay less, again a tried and true concept in the car insurance industry. Maybe soon we'll see health insurance companies offering individual breaks to people who grant the company access to their purchase history.
      • Zigurd 13y ago
        Aaaand that is why single payer means more freedom and not less, as the tinfoil/tebag axis would have it.
        • cglace 13y ago
          I couldn't imagine the government collecting that data on us and using it to change behaviors.
        • greedo 13y ago
          Until you start getting denied treatment for "risky behavior." Oh, and the ad hominem makes you look like an idiot.
          • Zigurd 13y ago
            Is there a single payer program anywhere that denies treatment for risky behavior, or that even has tighter restrictions on transplant candidates? The big concrete example of how a national health insurance system operates differently from a "free market" in insurance is that pre-existing conditions are covered. That's a pretty big step away from restrictive conditions. How do you make the argument that a single payer would reverse that?
  • ihsw 13y ago
    Because it can then be used for deception -- I can buy healthy food with my credit cards and buy shitty food with cash. Net outcome is my insurance rates go down but my actual risk goes up.
    • diminoten 13y ago
      You can also lie about how many tickets you've gotten, accidents you've been in, existing conditions, etc. These kinds of things are traditionally called insurance fraud, and even if it's not illegal (buying food with cash won't ever be illegal, let's be honest with ourselves), it'll be accounted for by the insurance companies. And if your technique for "sticking it to the man" is to eat yourself into unhealthiness, then... I guess you win. Congratulations.
  • bch 13y ago
    > Are they wrong? Did you not just increase their liability by 0.001%? Not if you bought the 6 pack for the contractors working on your fitness room.
    • diminoten 13y ago
      Like the other guy did, you're focusing on the specific example, when the question and debate revolves around the general concept. But if you really must play this game, then perhaps the fact that you believe a 6 pack to even be a worthy gift is telling of your lifestyle enough to determine risk. Maybe it doesn't matter if you give it to someone else or not, just the fact that you purchase beer a certain amount of times in a given time interval has shown to increase your likelihood of injury. Or not, I don't know. The point is, they would figure that out. We don't need to hash out a full implementation of this technology to understand it'd be possible.
      • mynewwork 13y ago
        But the specific example points out the flaw. The data can be misleading, for some people and in some scenarios substantially (buying a round of drinks for clients looks the same as buying yourself 8 drinks at the bar to your credit card). Plus, with government-run healthcare, the definitions of healthy will be subject to lobbying. Look at the arguments now about what is healthy food... are carbs bad? is fat? what about organic? GMO? Meat? Grains? Eggs are healthy again after being bad for you after being good for you. I have coworkers who swear by paleo diets and somehow everyone doing crossfit is convinced they're in the 2% of humans with a gluten sensitivity. Now imagine that confusion with lobbyists from every direction trying to prevent their products from being put on the 'bad foods' list.
        • diminoten 13y ago
          This isn't about government run healthcare, and the specific example is an implementation detail so no it does not point out the flaw, it points out nothing more than the fact that no system is 100% perfect.
      • 13y ago
  • g8oz 13y ago
    OP did increase their liability. But do we want to track right and wrong down to that level? Do we want to be that uptight and excruciating? When society's systems get too efficient the potential for tyranny gets get ever higher. Compare efficient colonizers like the English vs sloppy ones like the Spanish. Indigenous groups are far more of a presence in the countries where the latter ruled vs the former. That's not an accident. The weak administrative skills of the Spanish authorities gave enough space for the natives to not be completely boxed in, even though in general they could be more unjust than English colonial governments. Inefficiency is a safety valve, it gives hope when real justice can't be found. The injustice here being not being part of a proper health care risk pool the way the citizens in every other civilized country are.
    • diminoten 13y ago
      This isn't tracking right and wrong, it's tracking liability. There is no assertion of moral position here.
  • 6d0debc071 13y ago
    > Are they wrong? Did you not just increase their liability by 0.001%? If people with lower risks didn't pay for people with higher risks, there'd be no insurance market. If you can perfectly predict what's going to happen to someone - and you charge them all exactly what it's going to cost, + your overheads, then there's no reason they should buy insurance rather than putting the money into an investment plan. Actually they'd probably be better off with the investment plan. Insurance is like gambling, what does the insurance company know that you don't? What do you know that they don't? If they get really good at predicting your health, then being accepted for an insurance scheme would be a really strong argument to do something else with your money.
    • diminoten 13y ago
      It's a spectrum, not a boolean value. Insurance companies will never get to 100% omniscience, that's silly. Nor will lower-risk people pay so little as to not offer an incentive for insurance to exist. Lower risk is not no risk. Today the concept I'm talking about already exists in the form of good driver incentives, so the outcome you're predicting is already not how this plays out.
      • 6d0debc071 13y ago
        A lower risk insurer can afford to offer lower prices. Similar things happen in the credit market, where risk is more easily predicted. High risk credit is very expensive, often pricing people clean out of the market - door to door credit is declining in popularity as credit agencies find their margins getting slimmer. Even today, some people are to all intents and purposes uninsurable. Perfection isn't required. Just knowledge of a significant disparity.
    • enoch_r 13y ago
      This is simply not true. People are risk averse, and buy insurance to protect them from unlikely negative outcomes, not because they believe that the insurance company will, on average, pay out more than they pay in premiums. I can invest $200 a month for the next 10 years, or I can buy health insurance. On average, I will have more money after 10 years of investing. But the additional $24,000 of savings will increase my happiness very little relative to getting the healthcare I need in the case of a catastrophic injury or illness. So I'll gladly lose a little bit of money every month (statistically) to avoid the possibility of that outcome. Edited to add: one way to think of this is to pose the following thought experiment. Imagine that tomorrow you have a 50% chance of doubling your wealth and income, and a 50% chance of losing everything. What would you be willing to pay to guarantee that you keep your current wealth and income? If you're like most people, the answer is nonzero and positive. That's how insurance companies make money.
• oskarth 13y ago
  That is ridiculous. What we are doing is perfectly legal. Do these people think it's fair that a health-conscious individual should pay the same premium as a crack-addict? Remember that we are not going after your average Joe, the ones most affected by this are outliers with dangerous alcohol consumption patterns. Studies have shown that increased premiums for undesired excessive alcohol consumption actually decreases risk for excessive alcohol consumption. In fact, it'd be more shocking if we didn't use these purchases to set premiums. I just made that up, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that in an interview 10 years hence.
• deleted 13y ago
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• hfsktr 13y ago
  I cannot think of the name of it but this reminds me of a scene in a movie. Vaguely it was set in the future and insurance owned the world (something like that). At one point the main character was in the bathroom and the toilet did an analysis right there (he was drinking and swapped it for clean stuff or something like that). I just can't think of the name of it. Personally I find the idea disgusting.
• Apocryphon 13y ago
  Idea: services that intentionally fuzz up your data. You pay them a certain fee and they make purchases for goods, entertainment, etc. in subtle ways (credit card purchases). You are aware at all times what was purchased by "you." These purchases would not show up in a way to the general public (i.e., people you know), but is the type of thing that credit agencies, insurance companies, etc., might datamine for. Mess with their data that way by creating a cloak of obfuscation.
  • scarmig 13y ago
    Interesting. One issue I can see is that the service would likely provide tell-tale signs of it being used, either because of implementation flaws or just having a totally fuzzy purchasing pattern is itself a very distinct indicator. Insurance companies could then run risk profiles on people who use that kind of service, and it's possible/likely that users of that service would be unhealthier than average, resulting in higher premiums. Then the most healthy users of the service would face strong incentives to not use it, which further drives up its associated risk.
• tedunangst 13y ago
  What does "recently" mean? I've been reading exactly this anecdote for years now. Always with the same unnamed insurance executive.
• ctdonath 13y ago
  This is exactly the problem I have with any "federal sales tax" program: the airgap between what I'm buying and automated governmental analysis thereof shrinks to sparking distance, thanks to instant rendering of tax coupled with inevitable "requirement" to adjust that tax based on arbitrary legislated factors. Buy a six pack? healthcare premium increases. Buy health products? get a tax credit. Buy fertilizer? auto-crosscheck your recent contacts against known terrorists. Made your purchase sooner than speed limits make possible from your last known freeway location? pay your fine first.
  • tedunangst 13y ago
    How do you know that all that data isn't being collected by the state and and passed up to the federal government?
    • ctdonath 13y ago
      May be, but they can't admit it. I'm concerned about what happens when it's legislated, normalized, and accepted.