
Your insurer wants to know everything about you - bootload
http://www.theage.com.au/business/retail/your-insurer-wants-to-know-everything-about-you-20151201-gld5t1.html
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lumberjack
Is this good or bad from a societal point of view?

It seems like a way to try to calculate and thereby eliminate risk, would be
an overall beneficial thing. But then it also seems to make insurance less
effective overall.

Let's not think about big "evil" insurance companies for a moment. Say there
are 10 Amish guys who want to form a risk pool to provide emergency health
care for their families. They were just about to finalize the contract when
one of them proposes that they take a medical exam beforehand. It transpires
that one of them has lung cancer. Why would the other nine allow the poor guy
to partake in their risk pooling?

If you eliminate risk you also eliminate the need for insurance. This seems
like a good thing. But then you also leave a bunch of people helpless.

It's an interesting ethical question.

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cousin_it
From a societal point of view, I feel that healthcare should be available to
everyone regardless of ability to pay. That makes it more like redistribution
than insurance. Describing it as "insurance" is just a way of selling the idea
to people who believe in markets, and it backfires in exactly the way you
describe when insurers begin to discriminate.

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lisivka
I will damage my health a little just to stay in hospital forever for free.

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efes
I would rather allow you to do that than require you to harm other people if
you want to be provided for in an institutional setting.

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aburan28
Recently I started noticing ads from my insurer when I was up late stating the
"benefits of going to sleep early" and "why sleep is essential". This business
is going to get real sketchy in my opinion

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vollmond
Couldn't that be innocent, though? Can't an advertiser run different ads based
on time of day? You were up at night, so you saw the nighttime ads (for your
geolocation).

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aburan28
If it was innocent then I guess the question is why did they target me for ads
and who determines a normal sleep schedule? That means that are using tracking
cookies at some level. I should also note it happened multiple times and I
have never once seen my insurance advertising

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pavel_lishin
> _why did they target me for ads_

Because you were a human being who was up late.

> _who determines a normal sleep schedule_

Researchers and statisticians.

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gotchange
What if you're working the night shift and your sleep routine or pattern is
completely inverted?

There's a lot of assumptions done on the advertisers' part here.

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tedunangst
Obviously the problem is that the advertiser doesn't know enough about you.
They need to track more data, not less!

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gotchange
Obviously I am not arguing for more tracking by advertisers. I was just
pointing out the fault in their reasoning that they make a lot of assumptions
not based on strong science.

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pavel_lishin
Citing exceptions to general rules doesn't mean their assumptions aren't based
on science.

My advertisement for a beach vacation isn't "not based on strong science" just
because I'm not aiming it at people with albinism.

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littletimmy
Just put insurance in the public sphere, and we don't need to contend with
these parasitic corporations who profit of people's health.

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grecy
Eliminate insurance altogether. Even if everyone paid the same amount of money
they do today into a huge pile, and accidents were paid out of that pile,
there would be an enormous amount left over because nobody is making a profit.

Insurance is just a middle man taking their cut

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ams6110
The profit of insurance companies is hardly significant in the general problem
of health care costs. It's nothing close to an "enormous amount" relative to
total health care spending.

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jeffdavis
The more someone has a vested interest in your behavior, the less freedom and
privacy you will have. That goes for health insurance companies, which want to
accurately price in things like your diet and sleep.

But the same principle applies to government social programs. All money comes
with strings attached.

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lordnacho
Before we venture into whether it's good or bad, here's a couple of
observations.

1) The point of insuring is to reduce tail risk. If you have a 1/1000 years
chance of your house getting flattened in an earthquake, you want to spread
that bill over 1000 years. If you don't you might get away with it most years,
but you'll have a new house to buy if you're unlucky.

To contrast, if your house is flooded every other year, someone insuring you
will ask you for roughly half the likely damages each year. That's not
smoothing it out by much, and you might as well save up for the inevitable.

2) If you're going to smooth out risk, you need to know what the risk is. For
that, you'll need information. For instance if women are less likely than men
to get themselves hurt while driving sports cars, you will want to know
whether someone is a man or a woman. If old people are more likely to get
cancer, you want to know how old someone is.

3) If you do not heed the above observation, there's something called adverse
selection that will get you. Suppose you have a bunch of high risk people
mixed with low risk people. You'll calculate a premium that's somewhere in
between the two pools. The problem is the low risk people will look at it and
conclude it's expensive for them, and they'll be less likely than you'd
realised to sign up. So you then get a bunch of high risk people who think
it's a great deal signing up, getting killed in accidents, and costing you
more than you thought likely. It also means if you as a low risk person got
into an accident anyway, you'd be without insurance.

So is it good that insurance companies want more and more info? For the most
part, yes. It lets them price the premium more precisely, which helps everyone
get insured. We'll be able to pay for unlikely events at a cost that reflects
the likely average. And you wouldn't be paying for people who are more risky,
and you wouldn't be receiving anything from people in lower risk groups.

One thing to look out for is how we treat expensive-to-insure people. Even if
there's going to be a more accurate price for them, they may be very small
groups whom the insurance companies decide aren't worth the effort. For
instance if we know that 80% of people with the BRCA2 gene will get cancer by
age 50, you're going to calculate a huge cost for them. You'd be collecting
money from 5 people to hand it out to 4 of them, plus the expense of handling
a claim.

One interesting thing about this new information fountain is you can lose
money by having tests done. Say you have a parent with BRCA2, and people who
aren't tested have a 40% chance. WTF do you do then? You will either pay a
huge premium or barely anything.

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Canada
The more such data becomes required, the more demand there will be for means
to falsify it.

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eternalban
Here you go Google ..

