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Thread: Health Insurers Are Vacuuming Up Details About You — And It Could Raise Your Rates

  1. #1

    Health Insurers Are Vacuuming Up Details About You — And It Could Raise Your Rates

    https://www.propublica.org/article/h...ise-your-rates

    Without any public scrutiny, insurers and data brokers are predicting your health costs based on data about things like race, marital status, how much TV you watch, whether you pay your bills on time or even buy plus-size clothing.



    This story was co-published with NPR.

    To an outsider, the fancy booths at last month’s health insurance industry gathering in San Diego aren’t very compelling. A handful of companies pitching “lifestyle” data and salespeople touting jargony phrases like “social determinants of health.”

    But dig deeper and the implications of what they’re selling might give many patients pause: A future in which everything you do — the things you buy, the food you eat, the time you spend watching TV — may help determine how much you pay for health insurance.

    With little public scrutiny, the health insurance industry has joined forces with data brokers to vacuum up personal details about hundreds of millions of Americans, including, odds are, many readers of this story. The companies are tracking your race, education level, TV habits, marital status, net worth. They’re collecting what you post on social media, whether you’re behind on your bills, what you order online. Then they feed this information into complicated computer algorithms that spit out predictions about how much your health care could cost them.

    Are you a woman who recently changed your name? You could be newly married and have a pricey pregnancy pending. Or maybe you’re stressed and anxious from a recent divorce. That, too, the computer models predict, may run up your medical bills.

    Are you a woman who’s purchased plus-size clothing? You’re considered at risk of depression. Mental health care can be expensive.

    Low-income and a minority? That means, the data brokers say, you are more likely to live in a dilapidated and dangerous neighborhood, increasing your health risks.

    “We sit on oceans of data,” said Eric McCulley, director of strategic solutions for LexisNexis Risk Solutions, during a conversation at the data firm’s booth. And he isn’t apologetic about using it. “The fact is, our data is in the public domain,” he said. “We didn’t put it out there.”

    ...
    Full article at link.

    ---

    Without Privacy, everything will be used against you.

    Even worse, there is no Court of Law. There are no appeals. There is no one you can talk to, nor anything you can do about it. What they are doing is rationalizing the choice to take more money from you and pay for as little as possible. The problem many people have with Obamacare is it requires people to have Health Insurance, but does NOT guarantee that people will have affordable access to Health Care. There is two sides to this. The Medical Industry makes money with their version of "do you want fries with that" where they charge as much as possible for the least effective treatments, thus creating a need for more treatments. The other side is Insurance that seeks to take as much money from you as possible while providing you as little actual coverage as possible. Both sides want you trapped in a situation that makes them the most money.

    Rock and a Hard Place.
    1776 > 1984

    The FAILURE of the United States Government to operate and maintain an
    Honest Money System , which frees the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, is the single largest contributing factor to the World's current Economic Crisis.

    The Elimination of Privacy is the Architecture of Genocide

    Belief, Money, and Violence are the three ways all people are controlled

    Quote Originally Posted by Zippyjuan View Post
    Our central bank is not privately owned.



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  3. #2
    Low-income and a minority? That means, the data brokers say, you are more likely to live in a dilapidated and dangerous neighborhood, increasing your health risks.
    If so, you are also unlikely to even have medical insurance. You are gonna cost them a lot because you will go to the emergency room for treatment where it costs a lot more than seeing your own doctor before things got bad (since you don't have your own doctor). Those costs will be loaded onto the premiums of everybody else who does have insurance.
    Last edited by Zippyjuan; 07-18-2018 at 06:10 PM.

  4. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Zippyjuan View Post
    If so, you are also unlikely to even have medical insurance. You are gonna cost them a lot because you will go to the emergency room for treatment where it costs a lot more than seeing your own doctor before things got bad (since you don't have your own doctor). Those costs will be loaded onto the premiums of everybody else who does have insurance.
    That assumes that poor people wont pay their bills. If the bill was affordable, IE, not $100 bucks for a single aspirin, and $100k for serious medical issues, maybe the people being victimized by the system would be more willing to pay a reasonable bill?

    So here is what the politicians think. They think to ask "how do we get people to pay the bill" (both insurance and care provided) instead of asking why the costs are so high to begin with. Throw Zero Privacy into the mix and now you have a system that just cannibalizes those who cant afford the system to begin with.
    1776 > 1984

    The FAILURE of the United States Government to operate and maintain an
    Honest Money System , which frees the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, is the single largest contributing factor to the World's current Economic Crisis.

    The Elimination of Privacy is the Architecture of Genocide

    Belief, Money, and Violence are the three ways all people are controlled

    Quote Originally Posted by Zippyjuan View Post
    Our central bank is not privately owned.

  5. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by DamianTV View Post
    That assumes that poor people wont pay their bills. If the bill was affordable, IE, not $100 bucks for a single aspirin, and $100k for serious medical issues, maybe the people being victimized by the system would be more willing to pay a reasonable bill?

    So here is what the politicians think. They think to ask "how do we get people to pay the bill" (both insurance and care provided) instead of asking why the costs are so high to begin with. Throw Zero Privacy into the mix and now you have a system that just cannibalizes those who cant afford the system to begin with.
    Maybe the government should regulate how much hospitals can charge patients. Or what about a phone ap? I enter my symptoms (say a broken leg) and hospitals get to bid on how much they will charge me to fix it! (assuming I can limp to their location).
    Last edited by Zippyjuan; 07-18-2018 at 06:16 PM.

  6. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Zippyjuan View Post
    Maybe the government should regulate how much hospitals can charge patients. Or what about a phone ap? I enter my symptoms (say a broken leg) and hospitals get to bid on how much they will charge me to fix it! (assuming I can limp to their location).
    Must spread rep before dinging Zippy again...
    Quote Originally Posted by Andrew Ryan
    In Washington you can see them everywhere: the Parasites and baby Stalins sucking the life out of a once-great nation.

  7. #6
    LIVE FREE
    AND
    DIE!

    F K EM
    FLIP THOSE FLAGS, THE NATION IS IN DISTRESS!


    why I should worship the state (who apparently is the only party that can possess guns without question).
    The state's only purpose is to kill and control. Why do you worship it? - Sola_Fide

    Baptiste said.
    At which point will Americans realize that creating an unaccountable institution that is able to pass its liability on to tax-payers is immoral and attracts sociopaths?

  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by fedupinmo View Post
    Must spread rep before dinging Zippy again...
    Covered.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  9. #8
    Is the correct answer that we can do nothing but let but business walk all over us because regulations are bad?



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  11. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by VIDEODROME View Post
    Is the correct answer that we can do nothing but let but business walk all over us because regulations are bad?
    Either that, or refuse to patronize bad businesses, or start a competing business. Markets are free until they aren't, and the where does it end?
    Quote Originally Posted by Andrew Ryan
    In Washington you can see them everywhere: the Parasites and baby Stalins sucking the life out of a once-great nation.

  12. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by VIDEODROME View Post
    Is the correct answer that we can do nothing but let but business walk all over us because regulations are bad?
    That is what the MSM would have us believe. We need govt to fix everything. What should really happen is Free Market. Charge too much and lose patients. Insurance is nothing short of a legalized scam that has driven health care costs to beyond unaffordable for most people to pay on their own. Without the Insurance, these heath care facilities would have to operate by the Laws of Economics, similar to the Laws of Physics. It would drive down costs to a reasonable rate that people can afford.
    1776 > 1984

    The FAILURE of the United States Government to operate and maintain an
    Honest Money System , which frees the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, is the single largest contributing factor to the World's current Economic Crisis.

    The Elimination of Privacy is the Architecture of Genocide

    Belief, Money, and Violence are the three ways all people are controlled

    Quote Originally Posted by Zippyjuan View Post
    Our central bank is not privately owned.

  13. #11
    Well, if the solution is as simple as dropping such companies to take our business to competitors who don't do this, then I guess this isn't a big deal.

  14. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by VIDEODROME View Post
    Well, if the solution is as simple as dropping such companies to take our business to competitors who don't do this, then I guess this isn't a big deal.
    I'll go to that hospital in Cleveland instead of the one in Houston the next time I have a heart attack (assuming I don't die along the way). Saves me $50! (most medical problems aren't like shopping for a new TV).

    https://www.beckershospitalreview.co...-closures.html

    State-by-state breakdown of 85 rural hospital closures

    Written by Ayla Ellison (Twitter | Google+) | July 03, 2018 | Print | Email
    Of the 26 states that have seen at least one rural hospital close since 2010, those with the most closures are located in the South, according to research from the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program.

    Fourteen hospitals in Texas have closed since 2010, the most of any state. Tennessee has seen the second-most closures, with eight hospitals closing since 2010. In third place is Georgia with six closures, followed by Alabama, Mississippi and North Carolina, which have each seen five hospitals close over the past eight years.

    Listed below are the 85 rural hospitals that closed between January 2010 and July 2018, as tracked by the NCRHRP. For the purposes of its analysis, the NCRHRP defined a hospital closure as the cessation in the provision of inpatient services. As of July 3, 2018, all of the facilities listed below had stopped providing inpatient care. However, some of them still offered other services, including outpatient care, emergency care, urgent care or primary care.
    List at link.

  15. #13
    Free Markets Zippy. Just go the to the doctor on Craigslist working out of the local motel.

  16. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by Zippyjuan View Post
    Or what about a phone ap? I enter my symptoms (say a broken leg) and hospitals get to bid on how much they will charge me to fix it! (assuming I can limp to their location).
    You say this sarcastically, but this is a good idea.

    One of the primary reasons health care costs are so out of whack is because there is no rational pricing...you have no idea going in how much you are going to be charged for a given procedure or service and there is no competition.

  17. #15
    “We sit on oceans of data,” said Eric McCulley, director of strategic solutions for LexisNexis Risk Solutions, during a conversation at the data firm’s booth. And he isn’t apologetic about using it. “The fact is, our data is in the public domain,” he said. “We didn’t put it out there.”
    And there you have it.

    Most of this problem is self created...government and "the corporations" didn't force you to put Alexa in every room, festoon your home with wireless security, buy 10 smart phones and use a debit card to buy a cup of coffee.

    Throw that $#@! in the woods, and you'll cut off about 90 percent of the data stream.

  18. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by Anti Federalist View Post
    You say this sarcastically, but this is a good idea.

    One of the primary reasons health care costs are so out of whack is because there is no rational pricing...you have no idea going in how much you are going to be charged for a given procedure or service and there is no competition.
    They also have to pay for all that $ billion scanning equipment. Even if they rarely get used (some of them) each hospital wants its own instead of agreeing to share one (and lower their costs). Then you have all that paperwork.

    https://www.commonwealthfund.org/pub...ght-nations-us

    A Comparison of Hospital Administrative Costs in Eight Nations: U.S. Costs Exceed All Others by Far

    Synopsis

    Administrative costs account for 25 percent of total U.S. hospital spending, according to a new study that compares these costs across eight nations. The United States had the highest administrative costs; Scotland and Canada had the lowest. Reducing U.S. per capita spending for hospital administration to Scottish or Canadian levels would have saved more than $150 billion in 2011.

    The Issue

    Even as all nations struggle with rising health care costs, the United States remains an outlier. Several factors help explain higher costs in the U.S., among them, higher physician fees, a focus on specialist services at the expense of primary care, and greater use of advanced technology in medicine. Some studies also have noted the substantial administrative costs incurred by U.S. health insurers and providers, including costs associated with coding, billing, and similar activities. In this Commonwealth Fund–supported study, researchers sought to compare hospital administrative costs in the U.S. with those in Canada, England, Scotland, Wales, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, using data obtained for 2010 or 2011.

    Key Findings

    Administrative costs accounted for 25 percent of hospital spending in the United States, more than twice the proportion seen in Canada and Scotland, which spent the least on administration. Administrative costs were notably higher in the Netherlands (20%) than in other European nation.

    In the U.S., the share of costs devoted to administration were higher in for-profit hospitals (27%) than in nonprofit (25%) or public (23%) hospitals. Teaching hospitals had lower-than-average administrative costs (24%), as did rural facilities

    U.S. hospital administrative costs rose from 23.5 percent of total hospital costs ($97.8 billion) in 2000 to 25.3 percent ($215.4 billion) in 2011. During that period, the hospital administration share of national gross domestic product (GDP) rose from 0.98 percent to 1.43 percent

    Reducing U.S. spending on a per capita basis to Canada’s level would have saved $158 billion in 2011

    There was no apparent link between higher administrative costs and better-quality care.
    Last edited by Zippyjuan; 07-19-2018 at 05:56 PM.



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  20. #17
    We've also tried to shuffle around the costs of unpaid emergency room care. Its good that we don't let the poor or uninsured die on the curb, but we didn't bother to come up with funding. We tell the hospitals to treat them and figure out how to pay for it.



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