I'm an engineer building a product in the health insurance space that in theory will allow more accurate pricing of premiums based off of individual data from wearables. My question is why haven't health insurance companies built this already? It seems like many companies already went in this direction with their 10,000 step program, but they stoped right there. Why not go further?
Does anyone know of prior attempts? Anecdotally, I've Oscar attempting to do something like "hey, runners get X% discount" and so lots of runners sign up who also happen to be at risk of some kind of cancer and then they got blown up by the tails. Anyone else heard similar things? Thanks!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5135187/
For one thing many health risks take 20+ years to develop but you usually contract for health insurance for a year. By the time a health risk develops you will probably be with another insurance company, or your health insurance company will have been bought by another insurance company and then bought again and then bought again.
AFAIK, the fitness programs were based around many large employers running their healthcare insurance on a self-insured basis (often with an insurance company handling adminstration of the plan), and there's an expectation that increased fitness will decrease costs. Since the employer is paying the actual costs, decreasing them shows up in the bottom line; and incentivizing employees to do the fitness program might make sense. OTOH, some sort of requirement to wear a device to set an employee's healthcare premium sounds invasive, but I dunno.