Would you allow an insurance carrier to track your health for lower premiums?

In My Humble Opinion
1

So, had a sales pitch by a insurance carrier, Beam Dental, who is interested in getting agents and brokers to sell their group dental coverage. Usually, no big deal. You listen politely, compare them to the other offerings, look at their commission schedules, determine if they fit in your market, yadda yadda yadda. But this one… this was different.

Their value proposition is this:

Beam Dental provides all insureds with a special toothbrush which monitors your brushing activity… even to which parts of your mouth you brush better than others… and if the insureds do this well enough, they earn discounts on their premiums.

So, for you, it works like this:

Your employer selects new insurance plans. They decide to go with Beam Dental instead of, say, United Concordia or Humana. You, as the employee, if you want dental insurance, you have to get the plan which comes with the toothbrushes. You are not required to use the toothbrushes, but employers who have more… compliant… employees will receive discounts on future insurance premiums.

Some notes:

  1. Employees are tracked individually, but the employer can only look at aggregated data - they won’t know who isn’t compliant, only that their compliancy* numbers are hovering at 60%.
  2. Employees have to have a smart phone with bluetooth capabilities and an app installed. Of course, they have to pair their toothbrushes with their phone.**

So, the general question for discussion is: What do you think about this? Good, bad, indifferent? Yet another reason for socialized health insurance? The market proves its wisdom yet again?

Anonymous poll.

*If you would’ve asked me, I would’ve said “yes, compliancy is a word”. Well, it is one now! :stuck_out_tongue:

**Sometimes I wonder what percentage of sentences we speak on a daily basis would’ve been unintelligible gibberish in 1987?

2

Not a chance.

We have our whole health care system bass ackwards in this country. Health care should be there for people to stay well, not for insurance companies to guarantee their profits.

We don’t need access to health insurance in this country. We need access to health care. The sooner we figure out this difference, the better.

3

The question posed by the thread title/poll doesn’t match the situation described in the OP, which is about tracking behavior, not health.

4

Eh, I’ll live. Go ahead and mentally make the change.

(Would also like to note that other brands who do this have toothbrushes which can detect cavities, cancers, and more, so… close enough for the internet. :stuck_out_tongue: )

5

No.

Firstly, I don’t believe for one damn second that my personal information won’t be revealed to everybody other the sun. Be it via hacking or selling or just carelessness, it will get out there.

Secondly, it sounds like this would require me to have a smartphone. DEATH FIRST.

And also, as Aspenglow says, we should stop screwing around with insurance and just set up health care already.

6

I’ve long considered good dental health to be a part of overall good health. It galls me that insurance companies draw the distinction.

Bad enough for insurance companies to make determinations about what they will cover/not cover as regards health care on the basis of their profit margins. I’m damned if I would agree to let them make those profits on the basis of of my behaviors and how it affects their profit margins.

7

To be frank I don’t care much but I would prefer not to be tracked. My first cardiac incident was back at age 27, small stroke at 37, more broken bones and stitches than I care to admit to ---- and I just don’t want to explain it all. Ages ago I had to have a series of x-rays for my entire body. The tech who took them all had them up checking in case any needed redone. He looked at the films, at me, at the films and repeated it several times. He then said “I’m no doctor or anything but we have GOT to go drinking together. Some of these have to have some amazing stories behind them.” I just don’t need more people to go drinking with at my age.

8

I’m unsure how to answer. On one hand, I’m strongly opposed to this sort of monitoring. Won’t allow car insurance to install trackers in my car, for example. But on the other, as someone with pretty good health habits, I have no objection to paying lower premiums as a non-smoker, non-drinker. Much beyond that, it can get tricky. I might appreciate lower premiums to reflect my healthy weight, diet, and exercise habits, but I can see how that can quickly slide over into penalizing persons with pre-existing conditions.

Also, I’m having a hard time getting my head around the OP’s example of the tracking toothbrush.

9

How so?

Feel free to click the link to beam.dental if you have questions about how the technology works. It’s pretty general info, but you should get the idea.

10

The toothbrush is able to tell which part of your mouth is in at any given time. It can be presumed to include cameras and the ability to scan your brainwaves.

11

My dental coverage is cheap enough that this isn’t worth the trouble to me.

If it were my overall health insurance itself, sure, might save me hundreds of dollars.

12

This is my answer as well. Although I have a smartphone, it would undoubtedly require another invasive, data-harvesting application be downloaded.

Not only no, but hell no.

My company started up with this horseshit a few years back, trying to base health care costs on a personally worn step counter. My personal policy is: If you’re requesting information that is none of your business in order to profit from me, I am freed from any and all ethical considerations when dealing with you. Period.

I clipped the thing to my Chihuahua’s collar and let her keep me over the step limit. Eventually, a lot of questions and threats from people with mobility problems, and those who worked in closed (secure) labs* got the program canned. Good riddance.

*No devices which can transmit, receive, or record are allowed inside. No phones, fitbits, Apple watches, thumbdrives, etc. Since stepcounters can download/receive information they were banned as well. Obviously unfair, since those workers were unable to record steps for 8 hours of their day.

13

Sounds like they didn’t think it through. I assume your employer is splitting the premium with you so, which is typically their incentive to keep “your” cost down. If they had taken into consideration that all the lab workers would have lower step counts and raise the premiums (or not lower) that may have changed their decision.
Also, FWIW, before ACA, when your premium was based on aggregate health data about the company, that is why employers would offer to help employees quit smoking. The less smokers they have, the lower their insurance premiums.

To get back to the OP, my question is, if good dental hygiene can lower your premium, can it be raised if you don’t brush your teeth well enough? I’ve wondered this about car insurance as well. Some companies offer to put trackers in your car or check your credit report with the idea that if you have good credit or drive well, they’ll lower your premiums, but will the raise them if you don’t?
That’s what I would want to know before I answer.

14

Yeah - my difficulty was because my dental insurance - and annual dental costs - are pretty low, so I experienced dissonance thinking about how much tech/invasion would warrant what amount of savings - for me OR the company. Purely my shortcoming. I doubt I’d let insurance companies into my bathroom unless it was for a heck of a lot greater savings than my monthly dental premium.

15

It’s a form of salami slicing. Trying to send away or overcharge the people on the “bad” end of the scale.

Insurance works best when the maximal number of people are covered. This is the opposite of that.

So I would refuse to participate in such a … “scheme” regardless if it benefited me personally. One needs to have the big picture.

16

Exactly. Insurance is ‘pooled risk’. You create your pool of people, work out how much you expect to pay in claims for those people over a certain period of time, and collect the appropriate share from everyone in the pool. Some sub-pooling is fine–teenage drivers are in their own pool so more experienced drivers don’t have to pay for their inexperienced mistakes. But this scenario just puts us closer to 350 million pools of “one”. At which point your share of the claims = your claims. Which means you don’t need an insurance company, you need a checkbook.

Plus it’s creepy AF.

17

I voted hell no also. My issue with these stupid programs is that I have good health behaviors but I see no need to prove it to some asshat insurance company. That’s even apart from the issue that these programs can be gamed heavily. I’ve had a few employers who implemented step-counter walking programs that rewarded employees with discounted premiums. In every single “campaign” (they’re usually set up as fun competitions, like getting into teams and the first team to “walk” across the USA wins) there’s been one or two teams that record an order of magnitude more steps than the rest on the first day of the competition and continuing every day thereafter.

18

It’s not a hypothetical for me. My insurance premiums are significantly cheaper (and I get an extra $1500 in my HSA) if I participate in Vitality, and app/website that tracks my steps for points, and gives most points for weigh in/blood pressure/health check at a lab. It’s not too hard to make the points I need to get the maximum benefits, and I’m certainly not an athlete in the peak of health, but I do resent it. Insurance should be about balancing risk across broad populations, not mandating certain behavior from individuals. If I wanted to pay based on my own personalized risk, I wouldn’t need insurance.

19

I wouldn’t mind too much if a tracking toothbrush reduced my premium. I don’t really see the negative impact even if the whole world discovered how often I brush my teeth. But if I’m reading the OP correctly, that’s not what’s being described. For my premium to go down, not only I but everyone else in my company would have to demonstrate good brushing habits. I probably wouldn’t bother with that gamble.

20

That’s a correct reading of the situation, markn+.