How Big Data Is Destroying the US Healthcare System 507
KindMind writes "Robert Cringely writes on the idea that technological advances have changed the health care system, and not for the better. The idea is that companies now rate individuals instead of groups, and so move to a mode of simply avoiding policies that might lose money, instead of the traditional way that insurance costs were spread over a group. From the article: 'Then in the 1990s something happened: the cost of computing came down to the point where it was cost-effective to calculate likely health outcomes on an individual basis. This moved the health insurance business from being based on setting rates to denying coverage. In the U.S. the health insurance business model switched from covering as many people as possible to covering as few people as possible — selling insurance only to healthy people who didn't much need the healthcare system.'"
As an Asshole, I support this (Score:5, Funny)
Insurance companies can do what they like - who are we to tell them what policies they can and cannot agree to? Furthermore, by keeping the future-sick out of the pool, they lower costs for the patriotically healthy.
Down with Statism! Towards a Individualist Future for All!
Re:Sounds like a problem... (Score:2, Funny)
I agree, even though I am a free market advocate. The long-term solution to healthcare is completely free market: your parents buy you a health insurance plan before you're born (similar to how parents know they have to pay for their kids' college and braces). In the meantime, for those of us already born, Medicare should be expanded to cover everyone born before (e.g.) 2015, and no one else -- ever. A 100-year phase out of Medicare similar to the phase-out Ron Paul has proposed for Social Security.