It looks like US healthcare for the vulnerable is about to go from terrible to "let's overthrow the government."
I wonder how much personal invasion will happen here too?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opinion/insurance-ai.html
A.I. Is Changing Insurance
By Sarah Jeong
Some technologies are better left in the laboratory.
A smartphone app that measures when you brake and accelerate in your car. The algorithm that analyzes your social media accounts for risky behavior. The program that calculates your life expectancy using your Fitbit.
This isn’t speculative fiction — these are real technologies being deployed by insurance companies right now. Last year, the USA life insurance company John Hancock began to offer its customers the option to wear a fitness tracker — a wearable device that can collect information about how active you are, how many calories you burn, and how much you sleep. The idea is that your Fitbit or Apple Watch can tell whether or not you’re living the good, healthy life — and if you are, your insurance premium will go down.
This is the cutting edge of the insurance industry, adjusting premiums and policies based on new forms of surveillance. It will affect your life insurance, your car insurance and your homeowner’s insurance — if it hasn’t already. If the USA's Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions should vanish, it will no doubt penetrate the health insurance industry as well.
Consumers buy insurance from companies to protect against possible losses. But this contractual relationship is increasingly asymmetrical. The insurance companies once relied on a mix of self-reported information, public records and credit scores to calculate risk and assess how much to charge. But thanks to advances in technology, the capacity to collect, store and analyze information is greater than ever before.
A 2018 report from the consulting firm McKinsey notes that “smart” devices — fitness trackers, home assistants like Alexa, connected cars and smart refrigerators — are proliferating in homes. The “avalanche of new data” they can provide will change the face of insurance.
In 2014, the USA insurance company State Farm filed a patent application for a system that “aggregates and correlates” data for “life management purposes.” The application lists a wide range of information, such as “home data, vehicle data and personal health data associated with the individual.”
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