Comment by AlotOfReading
5 months ago
Leaving aside the specifics of this situation and the implementation difficulties, a corporate FOIA where legitimate researchers (and others like journalists) could get reasonable, vetted access to data sounds fantastic. It'd be great to know what criteria your insurance used to determine appropriate rate increases, or the history of food safety failures at the slaughterhouse that produced the meat at the grocery store.
Why would you take a moral stance against that (as opposed to the obvious practical stance against it)?
If it's fantastic then it would be worth starting an insurance company that gives that info, and eat the market. Nothing's stopping that right now.
That assumes all good ideas naturally translate into viable business models, but markets don’t always work that way. Consumers don’t always have the information, leverage, or incentive to push for things like transparency—especially in industries where companies benefit from opacity.
Not everything that’s good in a broader sense aligns with what businesses are incentivized to do. The absence of a transparency-first company doesn’t prove there’s no demand—it just shows that the market structure doesn’t naturally reward it.