
Strap on the Fitbit: John Hancock to sell only interactive life insurance - smacktoward
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-manulife-financi-john-hancock-lifeins/strap-on-the-fitbit-john-hancock-to-sell-only-interactive-life-insurance-idUSKCN1LZ1WL
======
Xcelerate
Once insurance companies can accurately predict everyone's risk and then
proceed to charge each person accordingly, how is it insurance anymore? The
whole point of insurance is to distribute risk evenly over a specific
population.

I think insurers should distinguish between _controllable_ and _non-
controllable_ factors, and they should not be permitted to discriminate on the
basis of non-controllable factors. For instance, if someone chooses to ride a
motorcycle instead of drive a car, then there should be a premium for that
policy. However, if someone is born with a genome that predisposes them to
dying much sooner from a specific disease, they should be charged no more than
anyone else, because you can't control your genetics.

I doubt most companies would willingly take the initiative on this though...

With regard to the article's point, not everyone is able to exercise
effectively to keep themselves in shape. People with disabilities are not
necessarily able to go for a run and should not be penalized financially for
being unable to do so.

~~~
patricius
Mandating that insurance companies must not charge higher premiums for
individuals with genetic diseases will raise the overall cost of premiums for
all customers or would at least inhibit any potential for decreases in
premiums. So in essence you are saying that - through government force - other
people should pay involuntarily for these people. I think it's laudable if you
have the desire to help them, and even more laudable if you put your good
intentions into action. But I think it's immoral to force people to do so.

~~~
dsr_
By this argument, it is immoral to force people to pay taxes in order to
support a local fire department. Only subscribers to a particular fire
department deserve to have fires put out, and the free market will allow
different fire departments to compete for your business.

This might be arguable if everyone lived in well-separated domains where there
is no significant risk of fire spreading from one to another, but that is not
the case for the vast majority of people.

If your morality doesn't work in the real world, it's not a good one.

~~~
patricius
It _is_ immoral to force people to pay taxes to finance a local fire
department if you believe that it is immoral in general to force people to
give up their property.

You can argue that in certain special cases, like in the fire department
scenario, you personally believe that theft is morally defensible from some
perspective. But then you are not really basing your moral standpoint on any
principle, but taking things on a case by case basis, and you end up in a
situation where you can essentially _always_ argue that using force is right.

~~~
michaelt
Nobody is _forced_ to pay taxes in the modern age of affordable travel.

There is a competitive market of jurisdictions, offering different prices and
products. Jurisdiction A includes trash pickup, which you might want because
reducing fly tipping increases property values. Jurisdiction B has no trash
pickup but low, low prices.

People who want B but who buy A instead can hardly complain that A isn't B -
any more than a person who buys wine can complain it's not beer.

~~~
patricius
So if I live in a city run by the mafia, who extorts me every month, I am not
really _forced_ to pay them, since I can just take the bus to the next town?

~~~
michaelt
Exactly. If the mafia have founded a city, and they offer plots subject to
monthly extortion, why shouldn't fully informed adults have the right to
consent to that?

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saagarjha
As much as I’d like everyone to use a wearable health/fitness tracker; I’m not
sure I’d like insurers to get everyone to do it and collect everyone’s health
data. Isn’t that the classic scenario of data collection overreach?

~~~
Fnoord
You are absolutely right but the problem started with the company selling the
tracker [1]. The original reason why wearables and health trackers work in the
cloud is because they are tiny and don't muster the resources to have
everything within the device; hence thin client. However, smartphones work
reasonably enough to have the data hosted there. Convenience of convergence?
Then why isn't the data stored with zero knowledge principle? With smart
speakers it seems the same story. Why not host an offline Wikipedia, have
speech analysis, and have the device work offline 24/7 as long as its
killswitch is disabled? Furthermore, what we need is a standard to self-host
(such as Yunohost. OTOH, many homes are worse secured than clouds.

[1] We need legislation to make the practices illegal, or hold these people
accountable, not in the least in case of data breaches. That's just the top of
the iceberg.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
You see, the problem is that people universally accepted "the cloud". When
Alexa first appeared it was beyond me why _anyone_ would buy. Turns out
Amazon's marketing worked so well it's now a standard household item in many
homes. The constant calling home by all Android phones is another example - we
learned how to live with it. Health data tracking seems just another tiny
step. Until people revolt against this huge issue, there is no way things
change as greed has no limits as history shown us.

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DoreenMichele
_Vitality policyholders worldwide live 13 to 21 years longer than the rest of
the insured population._

I'm skeptical here. This data point suggests to me "Rich people who can afford
cutting edge technology and who also probably have been well cared for their
entire lives naturally live longer and are the early adopters of this type of
insurance involving fitness trackers. From that, we are extrapolating that
fitness trackers cause longevity." It's a tail wags the dog type inference.

Also, when I was in insurance and they had a wellness benefit on policies, I
was initially jazzed that they were moving in the right direction of promoting
preventive medicine, yadda. Then I learned that the actual point of the
wellness benefit was that it gave people a small payout annually and this
improved customer retention. That's it. Actual welfare of the customer had
nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Disclaimer: I worked in insurance for over 5 years at a highly ethical company
and ended up with a pretty negative opinion of the industry as a whole.

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sdrinf
For future reference: this article, and specifically it's title is
deliberately misleading to form the general impression of "mandatory
tracking", so that they get clickthroughs.

From the horse's mouth:

| John Hancock Vitality Life Insurance now offers new and existing* customers
two options to support and incentivize healthier choices, wherever they are in
their wellness journey:

| Vitality GO: Vitality GO will be offered on all life insurance policies, at
no additional cost. With this basic 'be healthy' version of the program,
consumers will have access to expert fitness and nutritional resources and
personalized health goals through an easy-to-use app and website. And as they
reach key milestones, their healthy activities will be rewarded with discounts
at major brand outlets.

| Vitality PLUS: For $2.00 a month 5, customers will receive all the benefits
of the John Hancock Vitality Program, including savings of up to 15 percent on
annual premiums and valuable rewards for the everyday things they do to stay
healthy, like exercising, eating well and getting regular checkups.

[https://www.johnhancock.com/news/insurance/2018/09/john-
hanc...](https://www.johnhancock.com/news/insurance/2018/09/john-hancock-
leaves-traditional-life-insurance-model-behind-to-incentivize-longer--
healthier-lives.html)

Correct article title is here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18027323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18027323)
"John Hancock will include fitness tracking in all life insurance policies".

And with that, reuters.com enters into my HN blacklist.

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tomjen3
I have a fitbit (and have owned several different models). You can easily
score a lot "steps" by air-drumming, so it shouldn't be hard to make it look
like you are very active.

It would of course be pointless to have a fitbit if you cheat, so in practice
it is going to be a small number of steps that miscalculated, so it is fairly
accurate, but that changes once I get a bonus for hitting 10k steps.

------
chrisbolt
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18027323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18027323)

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chopin
How do they prevent "fraud"? If I was already a customer to whom they applied
this one-sided, I'd happily put this on a simulator.

------
exabrial
I wish it wasn't illegal to do this for health insurance in the USA.

~~~
ohazi
And I'm glad it is.

~~~
exabrial
Obesity is the #1 killer in America. Charging people more who are
intentionally harming themselves with poor diet and bad exercise habits is
both ethical and fair; to the people who are out of shape, and the people that
are in shape [subsidizing the former's health costs].

~~~
jhayward
> Charging people more who are intentionally harming themselves with poor diet
> and bad exercise habits is both ethical and fair

0) Heart disease, not obesity, is the number one killer in america. There is
not a particularly strong correlation (certainly not = 1.0) between heart
disease and obesity, diet, or even exercise.

1) There is very, very little correlation between exercise and obesity.

2) The systemic origins of obesity are not well understood, certainly not well
enough to declare "ethical and fair" any kind of punitive mechanisms.

3) Your argument appears to be steeped in Puritan ethics which are
unsupportable given modern science and medicine about the nature of free will,
how the biology and physiology of the mind affects heath outcomes, and even
the effectiveness of punishment as a generator of "good" behavior.

