Apple in talks with Aetna to bring Apple Watch to millions of customers
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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?'
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.
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.
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.
Looks interesting. Thank you.
With the amount of data that is being gathered on us, coupled with advances in machine learning and statistical analysis, in the near future, "they" will be able to figure out high risk scenarios before we even know about it.
If they drop coverage or increase premiums based on this, they are no longer an "insurance company". I don't know what we would call them.
Dropping coverage like that is illegal already.
> If they ... increase premiums based on this, they are no longer an "insurance company". I don't know what we would call them.
Quite the contrary - an insurance company, by definition, is expected to price insured entities based on the expected future payouts (ie, the levels of risk). More specifically, the sum of all expected future premiums that a patient pays should be slightly more than the sum of all expected future claims for that patient.
If you're expecting it to behave otherwise, then you're looking for something that isn't insurance - insurance is, by definition, a model that relates risk and price.
Insurance spreads the cost of all payouts by all patients as to spread out the risk amongst every patient. Not every patient will be profitable. The goal is to have enough healthy, profitable patients to balance out the sick individuals.
No, but no individual plan is ever expected to lose money. If that's the case, you're talking about something that isn't actually insurance.
You're illustrating the original point: when people talk about "health insurance", they're already talking about something that fundamentally is not insurance. If health insurance were insurance in anything but name, then increasing premiums based on expected future risk would be exactly how we would expect health insurance companies to behave.
"" More specifically, the sum of all expected future premiums that all patients pay should be slightly more than the sum of all expected future claims for all patients ""
You can not reduce the calculations to a single patient. If an insurer finds out that you will develop a certain type of cancer for which median treatment cost is 1M USD and lifetime support costs will be 30K USD/year, they should not be allowed to increase your premium accordingly.
No, it shouldn't. I mean, the thing you wrote is a true statement too, because of the distributive property of summation, but the point is that insurance does work on a per-plan level. If any individual's expected future premiums are less than their expected future payouts, then it's not insurance.
There's a common misconception that insurance is about pooling risk between patients, which is not really the case - it's true at an accounting level, but only as a secondary effect. The fundamental purpose of insurance is to smooth risk across states of the world, which is a completely different thing.
Pretend for the moment that spontaneous combustion of humans exists, can be predicted with some understood probability model, and is an insurable event. In that case, "spontaneous combustion insurance" is not about smoothing risk between Alice and Bob - it's about smoothing risk between universe A (in which Bob spontaneously combusts tomorrow) and universe B (in which Bob does spontaneously combust).
Spontaneous combustion is an easy example to use illustratively because it's a binary event, terminal (you can only combust once), and intuitively independent (by definition of spontaneity, Bob's combustion does not impact Alice's chances of combustion). This is a simplified version of the general insurance model, however, which is capable of handling non-binary events, non-terminal events, and interdependent events. In all of those cases, the risk smoothing happens between states-of-the-world, not between individuals.
> If an insurer finds out that you will develop a certain type of cancer for which median treatment cost is 1M USD and lifetime support costs will be 30K USD/year, they should not be allowed to increase your premium accordingly.
That's a value judgement that you're free to make, but at that point, we're no longer talking about insurance in anything but name.
Oh God no!
This would almost be as bad as when the local police forces and post offices near us got Segways. that and when schools were bamboozled into buying iPads for all students.
Apple is padding their bottom line, nothing more. Aetna is going along because it must make some higher ups feel good by association.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/01/apple-watch-sales-up-over-...
I’d say they are simply trying to grow their market.
These two statements are not in opposition if lots of watches are selling at a deep discount. When I google "apple watch amazon" the top link is a used model, second is a discounted series 1.
I think Apple needs this deal more than they admit.
I don't think Apple reports units shipped. Fitbit does. I don't know about Xiaomi. The numbers are a mix of reported units and estimated units.
There are probably enough sensors to detect untreated sleep apnea for example. Or the pattern of arm movement, heartbeat, sitting in one spot, etc, associated with binge drinking. Or early onset of Parkinson's. Or perhaps false positives associated with these things.
I'm not personally willing to create the equivalent of an OBD-II port on my body and let an insurance company have unfettered access to the data. Insurance companies, at least in the US, have shown they aren't shy about finding ways to cut their costs at the expense of someone's well being.
Marketers would have a field day with that data.
Accelerometers and GPS would allow them to narrow down specific types and patterns of sex as well. Lots of sex in cheap motels == high risk. Correlating customers together..this one has HIV, and appears to be having sex with this customer == high risk. Fun.
"This guy had increased heart rate followed by two minutes of physical activity... Joe, call Pfizer immediately!"
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...
Although you get rewards from them (Starbucks drinks, cinema tickets, etc.) rather than straight discounts on your insurance.
Why should I subsidise your insurance?
...why should I subsidise _your_ insurance?
(really, America is so weird. Even in our rather terrible non-single-payer insurance system it would be illegal to base premiums on lifestyle. Insurance cost is decided by law, you may buy some extras, the end).
/s [this tag necessary because idiots seriously believe this]
Side Note: I switched from an Android watch to a Fitbit for activity and sleep tracking for many of the reasons outlined above.