> What if the data shows having a few drinks increases the likelihood of healthcare costs? Otherwise, people who don’t have a few drinks are subsidizing people who do have a few drinks.
The whole idea behind health care is that some people subsidize other people - ie. most people are healthy and use less health care services than they pay for, while a few people get sick and require health care services that they would never have been able to afford.
I'm fine with subsidizing other people, the alternative is to be okay with people that have problems to be thrown out of the system and not receive the care they need.
In any case, it's not okay for insurers to have fine grained access to what people buy, eat, drink, do. I struggle playing it out in my mind in a way that doesn't end horribly.
> I'm fine with subsidizing other people, the alternative is to be okay with people that have problems to be thrown out of the system and not receive the care they need.
So the discussion is about when use of data is identify losses and remove them from the system versus not using data and spreading the cost out between all participants.
Healthcare is a sufficiently broad benefit that much of society can agree on subsidizing each other (except in certain countries), but even in countries with taxpayer funded healthcare, I don’t know if there would be a consensus on whether or not retailers should be able to track individuals to identify those causing losses and boot them from the system.
Certainly, no one would argue against the right of a small business owner to refuse to do business with a customer that is causing them a loss. At what point does a business become large enough that it can no longer do this?
> Certainly, no one would argue against the right of a small business owner to refuse to do business with a customer that is causing them a loss.
When the profit from occasionally serving one person in a wheelchair is less than the cost of providing the wheelchair access, yet we still demand it, indeed that's why we have to demand it - if you still made money from the person in a wheelchair, you'd put the ramp in anyway.
Yes, I guess there is an exception for people with disabilities, but in the context of this discussion, I mean someone who returning items excessively. Clearly a return policy is infeasible if every person returned every item from every person. There must be an assumption that a return policy won't be abused to keep the return policy feasible for everyone.
In the past decade I’ve anecdotally noted that some places with famously liberal return policies have tightened up. Outdoor equipment retailer REI is my favorite example.
They have switched from unlimited returns forever for any reason to 1 year.
My theory is it’s a combo of two things. 1. People abusing return policies. 2. More and more items that used to be durable becoming consumable. In a lot of industries the drive for lightweight and high tech has led to things that simply can’t last. I have a backpack that weighs less than a pair of jeans, but it certainly won’t last the way my dads old backpack lasted. Same thing with my battery powered drill, I really doubt that I’ll be able to find a battery for it in 30 years.
The backpack and the battery powered drill are two things that have shifted from buy it for life, to consumable good.
The whole idea behind health care is that some people subsidize other people - ie. most people are healthy and use less health care services than they pay for, while a few people get sick and require health care services that they would never have been able to afford.
I'm fine with subsidizing other people, the alternative is to be okay with people that have problems to be thrown out of the system and not receive the care they need.
In any case, it's not okay for insurers to have fine grained access to what people buy, eat, drink, do. I struggle playing it out in my mind in a way that doesn't end horribly.