Napa Valley Register : reported that Some questions on health insurance letter

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Big data + private health insurance = game over

Big Data Is Coming to Take Your Health Insurance [Cathy O'Neil/Bloomberg](Image: Rudy Herman, CC-BY) The existence of more personal health data and better algorithms for sorting it suggest that private medical insurance is just incompatible with 21st century technology. The other option is universal health insurance, meaning that everyone would be covered by something akin to Medicare. One approach would be to handcuff insurance companies in their use of big data technologies, preventing them from using predictive algorithms to assess risks -- or even from collecting the data in the first place. Big data + private health insurance = game overOnce big data systems agglomerate enough data about you to predict whether you are likely to get sick or badly injured, insurers will be able to deny coverage (or charge so much for it that it amounts to the same thing) to anyone who is likely to get sick, forcing everyone who might ever need insurance into medical bankruptcy, and turning Medicaid into a giant "high-risk pool" that taxpayers foot the bill for.

Hospitals can kill the health insurance industry—Commentary

In fact, hospitals, which provide the lion's share of America's health care, have already started to sell health insurance plans. And health care and health insurance are two different things. Certainly, they're not as strong as the stellar profits traditional health insurance companies have enjoyed in that time. You may know what you're paying in monthly premiums or what comes out of your paycheck to pay for health insurance. The financial results for many of the hospitals that started offering insurance plans since 2010 have been a mixed bag.


collected by :Lucy William

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