From the article: <i>This allows the insurance companies to keep insurance costs down for both the insured and the insurers.</i><p>No! Mathematically the insurance business works the same as long as the average premiums cover the average costs for the pool. Identifying higher risk individuals and charging them more does nothing to lower the average cost as long as they continue to buy insurance. It only spreads the costs around differently.<p>That is, unless the idea is to make the cost so high for risky patients as to force them not to participate in the pool.<p>Which is I guess what they are saying. It <i>does</i> lower average premiums in the pool the only way mathematically possible, by forcing at-risk or sick patients out of coverage.<p>This raises average costs for the original pool (from before some patients were priced out) because those patients forced out will show up later at emergency rooms with expensive problems and no coverage. But that is no longer the insurance company's problem, so who cares.<p>Well at a society level there is no forcing people out other than death. So unless we can get enough sick people to die quickly and cheaply this system just forces higher costs on everyone.<p>Or maybe we could just cover everyone in one national pool without keeping a secret database of everyone's health history to use against them and gouge them more?
Along with the GDPR, the EU also bought "Right to Explanation" for algorithmic decision making. Basically, a user has the right to ask for an explanation on an algorithmic decision. This regulation has been mostly buried in the deluge of GDPR content but it's an important shift in decision making. There's a nice paper which outlines the implications and HN too had a discussion on it couple of years ago [0, 1].<p>[0] <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.08813" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.08813</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12048223" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12048223</a>
Rather like the old joke about a banker who will lend you an umbrella while it's sunny but wants it back when it's raining, it seems that the health insurance business thrives on trying to avoid as far as possible giving healthcare to people once they're sick.
Collating a private database of health history is an extremely dangerous practice and I will just drop this article from rms which has further links to other systems [0].<p>The article in this post, however, is lacking an explanation of how MIB gathers the medical records. It is therefore unclear if the users gave their consent to share the information even if it was through vague fine print. On the other hand the story would be very different if the data was gathered and shared without consent and I might wonder if a legal case can be made here.<p>[0] <a href="https://stallman.org/ancestry.html" rel="nofollow">https://stallman.org/ancestry.html</a>
The article doesn't address whether an individual can request a full report of their own records and those of their dependents from this MIB. I can get a copy of my credit report for free, same should apply here.<p>Hmmm ... might be able to get a copy here: <a href="https://www.mib.com/request_your_record.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.mib.com/request_your_record.html</a>
Tip: If you are very casual smoker and see a form asking you "Have you ever smoked?" or "Do you smoke any tobacco?" then say no. If you say yes then you will see it getting reported to your health insurance and even life insurance and your premiums will go up as if you were chain smoker.
In the UK, health insurance companies buy data from supermarkets like Tesco (gathered from loyalty cards) to understand your lifestyle and potential risk by viewing what you eat and drink over a period of years.
Going out on a limb here, but if they are paying the bill, don't you think they have a pretty good idea what things cost? At the end of the day there are not that many things that cost $59,324.49 at Hospital X for example. So with a little deduction you could begin to ballpark the severity of illness