Why is it not fair for an insurance company to charge you a higher premium if you are leading a lifestyle that statistically makes you more likely to have health problems?
More specific to insurance companies, the potential/plausible abuses to increase profit don't take much effort to ferret out. And to make matters worse the data they use will invariable flag a lot of false positives that you'll have little to no way of fixing. For example, my girlfriend regularly picks me up a pack of cigarettes on her way home from work. She usually uses her credit card instead of cash. Ok, now she's flagged in the system as being a chronic smoker and her rates get jacked up to holy hell. Except, of course, she's not actually a smoker and I'd be super skeptical about her ability to reasonably explain this to some random customer service rep over the telephone.
Data mining usage habits rarely result in lower prices for people making positive, less risky choices. Non-smokers will probably be giving a trivial token discount, but unlikely anything more.
This is because we live in an inflationary economy. Most prices go up. As a healthy guy, I'd like the price increases to be inflicted on the fattie smokers rather than me.
Not that it really matters in the context of health insurance - the laws surrounding it are structured in such a way as to subsidize the fattie smokers at the expense of healthy gym guy, regardless of what info the insurance company has (and they will become worse in a couple of years, unless the supreme court stops it - good luck with that).
I have a friend who agrees with you, and I am constantly dismayed at the willingness of people to throw their fellow human beings under the bus.
There are better ways of improving total health than letting insurance companies screw more cash out of the more vulnerable members of society.
To describe such a person as "vulnerable" is a little silly. Their vulnerability is something they created themselves.
If you want people to stop eating fast food and watching TV all day, give them something more to live for than their next junk food hit instead of making their continued survival even more uncertain.
I think they merely have different utility functions than me, and assign a lower value to health, but a higher value to leisure. And I'd argue they have the right to continue eating chips and watching TV - they just don't have the right to force other people to pay for their choices.
But lets take your theory of mental incompetence seriously - in that case, isn't the solution some sort of institutionalization? I.e., assign some bureaucrat to make good choices for them, rather than merely forcing responsible adults to pay for their irrational bad choices?
It's probably worth mentioning the philosophy that drives my opinions on these issues. I want to minimize individual and total human suffering while maximizing individual and total human potential. In other words, I believe that every human being should have the right not to suffer, along with the opportunity to make their best contribution to the progress of humanity. Being poor and trapped by the mental stresses of staying alive leads to suffering, fast food temporarily alleviates that suffering, and increasing the cost of health insurance will exacerbate that suffering. I still care even if it's someone else suffering while I enjoy the money I might save each month by not paying for their lifestyle.
You seem to want to have it both ways. Either the poor are adults capable of making their own choices, or they aren't.
If they are mentally competent, they have the right not to "suffer" ("suffering" isn't the word I'd normally use to describe a life of leisure). They just choose not to exercise it.
Hardly. I certainly wouldn't hold a person being tortured responsible for their actions, but I also wouldn't permit them to make their own decisions.
My position is that the right to make a choice and the responsibility for that choice go hand in hand. Either the poor are allowed to make choices and suffer the consequences, or they aren't. If you'd like shades of grey, perhaps they could jointly make decisions with a guardian, and the guardian is partially responsible for those choices.
2. For the same reason that your employer is not entitled to put cameras in your bathroom to make sure you aren't doing anything that might impact your job performance.
2.. Because many employees would choose to not work for such an employer, and this negative impact would outweigh the potential benefit? I haven't seen anything to suggest that people would choose not to be insured by a company that profiles its clients in this way.
And if you want to start down the "lifestyle" road then why shouldn't people who have kids pay more (it is a choice too), or the people in LA (who are more likely to get skin cancer). And remember back in the 60s people didn't think cigarettes were that harmful. Soon we'll find out that fat is good, or bad, or was it salt? Do we get to retroactively charge and refund people as scientific evidence mounts up?
A contributing reason that health insurance is so expensive is that people have been using it as a way to only pay 20% or less of expenses they know they are going to have.
By the way, if you buy your own insurance, and you have kids, or want maternity coverage, you pay more.
That is 100% correct. My point was that the US system of health "insurance" is anything but insurance.
> ... that people have been using it as a way to only pay 20% or less of expenses ...
That isn't the case. Ultimately the premiums paid by you and/or your employer as part of your "benefits" (foregone salary) will cover most of your expenses, otherwise it isn't a viable business model as pretty much everything involves an insurance transaction. The actual procedures really don't cost that much. It is the extra layers of obfuscation, administration, multiple parties etc that totally confuse what is going on.
You should try buying your own insurance someday. It becomes obvious again how it really isn't insurance. I believe California health insurance now requires maternity coverage.
Because you don't hire them to nag you, you hire them to finance certain forms of consumption. None of the numbers about even smoking have held up very well over time. "Lifestyle policing" is, like exercise mania, about vanity, not health. The exercise industry is there to pump up sports medicine spending while assuaging the Baby Boomer terror of death. Go look up which is faster rising, sports medicine or oncology. People have enough information about consumption choices to make informed choices. We should leave them be.
But the point is you hire them, they don't own you.
"The servant is the one that takes the money" - Lawrence of Arabia.
* Car insurance, which is basically required across the U.S., seems to work a little closer to the way it is "supposed to".