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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 c

• 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?
          • greedo 13y ago
            Because it's easy to see how the nanny state would love to restrict you from buying large sodas (NYC) or other "risky" behavior.
    • scarmig 13y ago
      The flip side of that is that people who don't provide that information are going to be grouped into a pool of relatively high risk people and be forced to pay higher bills. And the incentives line up such that, if you're better than the average non-sharer of personal information, you'll be significantly better off switching to being a sharer, which in turn increases the risk profile of the remaining non-sharers. And the cycle repeats until no one can afford not to share all their information. And the same cycle will push insurance companies further and further into your personal life. Oh, you play video games a couple hours a week? That's $15 extra/month. Oh, you prefer watching football to watching the Wire? We'll ring you up for $5 extra/month. You're gay, that's $10/month. You married a person with an above average BMI? Well, that puts you into a higher risk profile, you'll see the charge on your next bill. Look, Aetna's new monthly offer: a purely voluntary opportunity for you to lower your insurance bill by up to 30%, just by installing a chip into the base of your skull and video cameras throughout your home, all paid for by the Company! And the insurance companies that don't do this will face higher costs and lower profitability, eventually pushing them out of the market.
      • diminoten 13y ago
        Is this what happens today with car insurance? I don't think that's the case. Insurance companies offer "good driver discounts" all the time. What's the difference?
        • scarmig 13y ago
          Yes, in theory it's just an extension of existing principles, and it will be a fast but gradual process grounded in practices that existed throughout the 20th century or even longer. Technology changes things, though. A bullet might be considered just a better arrow, and a car a more efficient horse. But that doesn't mean they didn't radically uproot tradition and shared moral convention.
      • enoch_r 13y ago
        I have serious reservations about our changing cultural attitudes towards privacy too. But let's be honest here--this would make insurance cheaper for a lot of people, and more expensive for the subset of people who are currently getting subsidized by their peers. I mean, say that playing a couple hours of video games per week really does increase mortality significantly--why should people who don't play video games be forced to subsidize your habits (this is unlikely, anyway--I don't think one's choices of which leisure products to consume are significantly correlated with either positive or negative health outcomes)? So why not use examples like these? "Oh, you bike to work? Great--your bill is going down! Oh, you have a good credit score? Okay, your premiums just went down again. Oh, you eat salad once in a while? Great, it doesn't take much to eat more healthily than the average American, so--you guessed it--your bill just went down again!" Less information asymmetry between customers and insurance companies would lead to better prices for safer people, and fairer prices for riskier people (by "fairer" I mean "closer to their average lifetime insurance payout). Whether it's worth it in terms of the loss of privacy is another question, but we shouldn't stack the deck by pretending everyone's premiums will go up unfairly.
• 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.