Read on Twitter
This is a really interesting article about how advances in the collection of medical data could cause problems in the American system, whereby most health insurance cover is paid for by employers. https://twitter.com/qz/status/1199991438316101632
Basically they point out that soon there will be rather more accurate information regarding the ill health risk profile of individuals than there is now. This means that rather more people than now will become difficult and expensive to ensure. Essentially because insurance
companies have a strong incentive to exclude the more expensive, higher risk, individuals, or, at best, charge them a lot more. The principle of shared risk that underlies all insurance breaks down if there is too much information about the individual’s variable risk
This suggests to me that technical advances may be on the verge of making health care systems based on health insurance through an insurance marketplace unworkable.
The NHS system because it pools risk across the whole population with no opportunity for “adverse selection “ is the only solution I can think of, future proofed against this problem.
( “Adverse selection” is where low risk individuals don’t bother to get insured, so depriving the insurance company of profitable customers on the one hand, and where people who know they are high risk but the company doesn’t have a higher propensity to take out insurance...)
