What if you dental hygiene isn’t up to their standards so instead of your premium decreasing, it increases?
While I voted “I hate it but would allow” because that’s what I do, are people really saying they’d pay, say, twice as much, for the privilege of not telling their insurance company things like how much they weigh and what their cholesterol is? Because I don’t really have a choice of insurance companies. I get the one my job offers. And Obamacare isn’t for people who have been offered insurance by their workplace. So I can either pay three or four times as much for third party insurance that probably provides worse coverage, almost twice as much for the same coverage, but not disclosing any of my health numbers, or else suck it up and go to a weigh in once a year. I’m not made of money, so I choose the latter, even though I hate it on principle.
Wasn’t sure how to vote.
I’ve seen this already being done with auto insurance.
I’d rather just see national health care which would make this obsolete. Plus it strikes me as extortion adjacent.
But while the particular example is horrible, there is the seed of a really great idea buried away in there.
Personal tracking is great as is any kind of feedback system when made available for private use. People will buy them on their own, like fit bits. No need to turn it into surveillance. If you want to encourage it, do it as a subsidy.
The other issue is, it could unintentionally encourage the idea that brushing is the only important factor for dental health.
This is not at all true. Your employer-offered plans are most assuredly ACA compliant.
How is that better? Do you see a meaningful difference between “you’ll get a discount/subsidy if you do it” and “you’ll be charged more if you don’t do it”?
I’m sure it is. What I meant is that I’m not going to get a better deal on the exchanges. It would be no different than buying third party insurance before Obamacare. It’s going to be significantly more expensive than my employer provided plan, because my employer pays most of the premium. My point is that I get the insurance I’m offered or I pay a whole lot more for worse coverage. I can’t really vote with my feet on this one.
What’s next, providing “smart condoms” to monitor our sexual activity, saving them money on STD treatment?
I hate this idea, but my wife’s employer requires it. I would not do it if I had an option.
The good part of this is when I refuse the toothbrush and raise* everybody’s rates, the system won’t tell my employer and fellow employees that I’m the one pissing in the swimming pool.
The bad part of this is that as soon as somebody mentions the subject I’d immediately start criticizing it, and my infernal honesty will force me to promptly concede that I’m the one pissing in the swimming pool. (The fact I don’t have a smartphone would probably clue them in anyway.) This will of course cause me to be hated and ostracized by my fellow employees, which will be super for company morale.
(My infernal honesty would also prevent me from strapping the toothbrush to the beaters of an electric mixer and faking the results, so no help there. Not that that would help without the smartphone anyway.)
- Don’t help lower, which means raise.
They would pay for the device but you would do the tracking yourself. It would be like giving you a gym membership but not checking your attendance.
I can see some people doing it - I mean, they do already for auto insurance - but my privacy is worth more to me than a piddling amount off my insurance. I can also see this eventually becoming the private sector equivalent of “sin taxes”, modifying behavior by charging more for what they don’t like (or don’t help their bottom line).
I hate the idea, and would not let them track me.
But my reasoning is the same for this as any other similar arguments. The whole model presupposes that “they” know what the data that they would be collecting means. Even with big data analytics nowadays, I am still very suspect that the algorithms can conclusively state that my Behavior A equals Outcome B.
We went through this a couple of years ago with the discussion of using Credit Score in hiring decisions. The assumption was that a good credit score equaled a good employee. Well, (sorry, no cite) but it turns out that the two are unrelated!
So, I look at that recent example of trying to analyze outcomes that falls short as indicative of what one might expect in this proposed model.