Comment by trollbridge
1 day ago
This sounds like excellent evidentiary material for a future insurer or government health provider to decide you're uninsurable, not eligible for a job, and so on.
And the great thing about it is that you already signed all your rights away for them to do this exact thing, when we could have had an open world with open models run locally instead where you got to keep your private health information private.
Can you explain the exact way in which this is possible? It’s not legal to be denied jobs based on health. Not to deny insurance
And how would you know what they base their hiring upon? You would just get a generic automated response..
You would not be privy to their internal processes, and thusfar not be able to prove wrong doing. You would just have to hope for a new Snowden and that the found wrongdoings would actually be punished this time.
I don't get it, if you're medically unfit for a job, why would you want the job?
For instance, if your job is to be on your feet all day and you can barely stand, then that job is not for you. I have never met employers that are so flush in opportunities of candidates that they just randomly choose to exclude certain people.
And if it's insurance, there's a group rate. The difference only variable is what the employee chooses out of your selected plans (why make a plan available if you don't want people to pick that one?) and family size. It's illegal to discriminate of family size and that does add up to 10k extra on the employer side. But there are downsides to hiring young single people, so things may balance out.
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Do corporations use my google searches as data to hire me?
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This fails the classic conspiracy theory test: Any company practicing this would have to be large enough to be able to afford to orchestrate a chain of illegal transactions to get the data, develop a process for using it in hiring, and routinely act upon it.
The continued secrecy of the conspiracy would then depend on every person involved in orchestrating this privacy violation and illegal hiring scheme keeping it secret forever. Nobody ever leaking it to the press, no disgruntled employees e-mailing their congress people, no concerned citizens slipping a screenshot to journalists. Both during and after their employment with the company.
To even make this profitable at all, the data would have to be secretly sold to a lot of companies for this use, and also continuously updated to be relevant. Giant databases of your secret ChatGPT queries being sold continuously in volume, with all employees at both the sellers, the buyers, and the users of this information all keeping it perfectly quiet, never leaking anything.
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> And how would you know what they base their hiring upon?
GDPR Request. Ah wait, regulation bad.
> It’s not legal to be denied jobs based on health.
There is a vast gap between what is not legal and what is actually actionable in a court of law, which is well known to a large power nexus.
> It’s not legal to be denied jobs based on health. Not to deny insurance
The US has been pretty much a free-for-all for surveillance and abusing all sorts of information, even when illegal to do so. On the rare occasions that they get caught, the penalty is almost always a handslap, and they know it.
How are you ever going to prove this?
You just get an automated denial from the ATS that's based on the output from AI inference engine.
The ADA made it illegal to discriminate against job seekers for health conditions and ObamaCare made it illegal to base cover and rates on pre-existing conditions.
What are the chances those bills last long in the current administration and supreme court?
And yet, if you want life insurance you can’t get it with a bunch of pre existing conditions. And you can be discriminated against as a job seeker as long as they don’t make it obvious.
These strawman arguments lack nuance.
If the person can use AI to lead a noticeably better life, something that may have been impossible previously due to economic circumstance, then the first order benefits outweigh the second order drawbacks.
I’m not disputing what you’re saying, I just think that treating it like a zero sum game every time the conversation comes up is showing an immense amount of privilege.
You, me, the parent commenter; we’re all dying, we don’t have time to optimise for the best outcome.
If the tool that allows you to have a “noticeably better life” is heavily subsidized by venture capital, you have turned yourself into a ticking bomb.
there is also no easy way to build a perfect health AI without giving up some privacy. Now there will always be risks, but this is why I think China might overtake everyone else in Healthcare AI at the least
> when we could have had an open world with open models run locally instead where you got to keep your private health information private
But we can have that? If you have powerful enough hardware you can do it, right now. At very least until the anti-AI people get their way and either make the models' creators liable for what the models say or get rid of the "training is fair use" thing everyone depends on, in which case, sure, you'll have to kiss legal open-weight models goodbye.
Precisely right. Related. https://www.socialcooling.com/
This is an argument against the general data collection internet NOT chatGPT.
What do you consider the purpose of life to be? To me being in good health is immensely more important than health insurance, a government health plan, or a job.
I know that neither health insurers nor any government agency nor anybody else have even 0,0000000000000001% as much interest in my health, well being and survival as I do.
When it is the matter of my health and my life, I care as much about what an insurer or employer thinks as I would care about what the Ayatollah of Iran thinks. Or what you think. Ie: Those opinions are without any value at all.
Most of us cannot afford to pay the full cost of healthcare for an emergency or major intervention. Medical bankruptcy is an increasingly common phenomenon.
So if insurers can cut you off based on your ChatGPT queries or test results then you may find yourself in serious debt, homeless, without medical care, etc
Money is imaginary. Health is health. Sacrificing your health and your life in order to hedge against a completely hypothetical situation is not a dignified existence.
Bankruptcy is of course much preferable to not having your health. Even having to argue this is bizarre. We are not human batteries in the Matrix. Our purpose is not to please institutions or destroy our own lives for fear of hypothetical situations.
Don't you understand that you only have one life and one body. That's it. You have 70 or 80 years with one body and one mind. That is the only thing which matters.
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System working as intended!
If an insurer is able to reduce (or recoup) costs from likelier risks, then the remaining insureds benefit from lower premiums.
If the goal is providing subsidies (i.e. wealth transfers), then insurance is not the way to do it. That is the government’s role.
Insurance that is maximally responsive to patient health changes in terms of cost (ie making healthier people pay less) ends up being an inefficient way of just having people pay for their healthcare directly.
And it naturally means the people with highest premiums are the least likely to be able to afford it (the elderly, the disabled, those with chronic conditions that make them less likely to maintain high earning jobs steadily, etc)
The obvious retort to this is:
"If I focused on my health, ate clean and exercised daily, why should I also be subsidizing Billy "video-games-are-my-exercise" fatass's chronic health conditions?"
This is why there is a hyperfixation on shifting blame away from (failing) individuals. The logic breaks when Billy has to admit he just hates exercising.
And yes, before you comment, I know "maybe Billy has (condition outside all control) so it's not on him". Please, see what I just said in the previous statement.
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> Insurance that is maximally responsive to patient health changes in terms of cost (ie making healthier people pay less) ends up being an inefficient way of just having people pay for their healthcare directly.
That's true for predictable costs, but not true for unpredictable ones - which is the point of most insurance (housing, car, etc). The point and use of insurance is to move risk to entities that can bear it.
Utility is non-linear with money, and so you easily have situations where spending X times more on something "costs" you more than X times if measured in how useful the money is to you.
Typically, as you have more money, each further dollar doesn't provide as much benefit as the last (sometimes things are lumpy, the difference between "not quite enough to pay rent" and "just enough to pay rent" is huge, but broadly this is true). Going from $1000 to $10000 is more impactful than $1001000 to $1010000.
That means that moving the other way, each additional dollar spent has a greater personal cost to you.
Therefore, sharing unlikely but high expenses can mean that your expected cost is the same (if there's no profit/middleman) or a bit higher, but your expected personal cost is lower.
Not a US citizen, so a genuine question: do US health insurance companies have a track record of passing on such savings to consumers?
That has not been my impression as an outside observer.
"passing on such savings to consumers"
Absolutely not. They inflate prices by 200% and then give you 20% "savings" back. The whole idea of a health insurance company as publicly traded corporation is totally insane. They are designed to extract maximum profit from wherever they can get. The is no incentive to save money for patients. Any savings go to shareholders.
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Ostensibly, the Affordable Care Act was supposed to reduce the average family's premiums by $2,500 a year.
When that didn't happen, the story changed to that number being how much more premiums would have risen.
Insurance premiums have only gone up as far as I can remember, though there's a ton of variables at play here. Inflation is an obvious one, plus continual introduction of more and more costly treatments- biologic injections, cancer therapies and so forth. The unfortunate increase in obesity rates in my lifetime (along with all the health complications) has been a significant contributor as well.
It all adds up.
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you're correct. UHC is so hated because they're a "pharmacy benefits manager." - an organization that exists soley to make your life so miserable you give up on getting your medication.
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Health insurance companies in the US are not allowed to deny coverage, and can only price premiums based on age (highest premium capped at 3x lowest premium, location, and tobacco use.
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/pre-existing-conditions/
https://www.healthcare.gov/how-plans-set-your-premiums/
Health insurance premiums in the US are more tax than insurance. They also have low single digit profit margins with less than desirable shareholder returns (many are non profit in the first place), so they don’t have much room to lower premiums without also reducing healthcare expenses.
The insurance business in general is very competitive and not very profitable, so an insurer that tries to collect outsized premiums will usually suffer a loss of business.
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We agree that insurance is not the right way to handle health as a product, since some people predictably need much more medical treatment than others. But it’s how the US has chosen to do it, so we have to do it in a way that works. Correctly identifying a systemic issue won’t pay your medical bills.
That is not how the US has chosen to do it. The ACA prohibits using anything other than age, location, and tobacco use for premium pricing, and the ACA prohibits denying coverage (resulting in a wealth transfer from healthy to sick).
Even the age rating factor is capped at 3, so there are also massive wealth transfers from young to old.
Mathematically, health insurance premiums in the US are more tax than insurance premium.
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