
Apple in talks with Aetna to bring Apple Watch to millions of customers - brandonb
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/14/apple-reportedly-in-talks-with-aetna-to-bring-the-apple-watch-to-millions-of-customers/
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tomaskafka
Let's not forget that what's even more profitable than 'pricing insurance
according to actual activity' (which is a nicely sounding PR cover up) is
'dropping people with early symptoms of a disease before it gets found by
their doctor'. Which is unethical, but legal (right?) and extremely, extremely
profitable.

Keep all premiums, drop people with cancer before they find out about it. And
yes, if it's possible to infer pregnancy from shopping bills, then inferring a
early health problem from a detailed 24/7 tracker data will be much easier.

And if you want to opt out of this? 'Here are our rates without a fitness
tracker discount, they cost 5 times more, ok?'

~~~
m_mueller
.. which is why a government guaranteed insurance with good overall coverage
is necessary. severe market defects in health care furthermore make dictated
prices for services/prescriptions necessary. Adjusting Obamacare for that you
end up with the Swiss system - still expensive bur at least effective and IMO
fair.

Thinking about it, increasing information asymmetry due to machine learning
applied to marketing may make heavy regulations necessary in most other
sectors as well. Imagine software that tracks every person and figures out
what they need when, identifies a monopoly of opportunity for any given good
and them jacks up the price just for that person individually - in real time,
while the person walks up to it.

Maybe that's how capitalism ends. Slavery 2.0.

~~~
specialist
_" Imagine software that tracks every person and figures out what they need
when..."_

aka the status quo.

People are profiting from my data. I want my cut. Screw privacy. I want my
cut.

Any one storing or using my data for any reason owes me money.

Sell my address to a direct mail campaign. I want my cut.

Need my health history for some longitudinal study that may ultimately save
lives. Awesome. Pay me.

Use my purchase history to recommend a new pair of shoes or sell ads. Woot!
Pay me.

Micro target my snowflake demographic for targeted political agitprop (aka
campaigning). That's worth at least $50. Pay me.

~~~
m_mueller
Have you looked at the BAT project? Seems to me that something along these
lines could bring such a vision closer.

As in, your browser blocks tracking / identification by default (integrated
TOR?). Sites can offer you a bit of tokens if you agree to share your identity
/ if you let them track what you're looking at. It's a bit of an extension of
what BAT aims for, but I think their vision goes in such a direction.

I could see such a thing taking hold, just like AdBlock Plus and co. have
become a thing that advertisers / publishers need to work around.

~~~
specialist
Do you mean Basic Attention Token?
[https://basicattentiontoken.org](https://basicattentiontoken.org)

Looks interesting. Thank you.

~~~
m_mueller
Yep, that's the one. Disclaimer: I hold some of those ;).

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pawadu
_" Aetna now reportedly has ambitions to offer it to a wider field — adding
large swaths of new health data to pull from and giving the health insurance
company insight into the activities of its customers."_

Oh God no!

~~~
zimpenfish
It'll be opt-in and this isn't a new thing - there's several UK insurers
that'll give you discounts and bonuses for life insurance if you log workouts
with their apps. This just makes it easier for both sides.

~~~
jeron
honestly I'd support a program where the more you work out the lower your
insurance premiums would be. Pretty hard to cheat workouts with Apple Watch
when it has a heart rate sensor and all that.

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Noos
You're okay with corporations having extremely intrusive tools to track your
behavior and control it through price for their own benefit?

~~~
zimpenfish
For health (which we're talking about), life, or car insurance (since a bunch
of UK insurers also have "safe driving" apps that earn you points, etc.),
yeah, sure, why not?

~~~
coldtea
Because obviously they can use those to profit by dropping eg people they
diagnose (or just infer statistically) with serious problems before they
develop, or raise their prices, etc.

This is not about some extra win-win motivation to be healthier...

It's about turning risk (which is supposed to be what insurance companies are
paid for) into rent-seeking...

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JohnTHaller
If Aetna wanted to offer customers discounts on insurance for healthy
activity, it would make far more sense to do it with something like a Fitbit.
A purpose-built device for tracking activity and heartrate. The Apple watch
doesn't do as good a job as the fitbit at fitness tracking, is bigger and
heavier, is far more expensive, and gets far worse battery life. Not to
mention the fact that the Apple Watch only works with iPhones meaning that it
would be useless for the majority of US smartphone users whereas the Fitbit
works with both iPhone (as much as Apple lets them) and Android.

Side Note: I switched from an Android watch to a Fitbit for activity and sleep
tracking for many of the reasons outlined above.

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snewk
my speculation is that these talks are specifically in regard to tracking some
biometric that the current line of apple watches doesn’t yet have sensors for.

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kaffeemitsahne
It would be pretty good business as a very healthy person to walk around with
your arms full of other people's trackers.

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trapperkeeper74
The secret Apple project for potentially blood glucose monitoring would be
amazing. Non-interstitial fluid / noninvasive sounds like a really hard
problem that may require a very bright light source and/or a sensor more
sensitive than used for heart rate. It's a worthy goal. Even more awesome
would be a limited generic mass-spectrometer that could do more, arbitrary
blood chemistry quantification in software without having to develop
many/additional specialized sensors.

