MIT boffins' code scans your health claims, tunes plans for bosses

The US health insurance industry

More broken than a very broken thing.

Please never export that shit to civilised countries.

On the other hand

Won't insurers use the software (or a variant) to do targeted boosting of premiums to match an industry or large employer? It's an arms race.

Didn't Wall Mart get some bad publicity because they were taking live insurance out on employees that paid the company and not the spouse if the employee died while they were working for them?

I can already think of a couple of different ways this can be abused. The US spends twice as much as the UK on health care but get the same or less for their money. That is not a system we need to copy or import.

Missing the obvious

" when certain cancers or chronic conditions are on the rise in a company"

Then you might want to look at your health and safety policies, your [American equivalent of COSSH] , and health monitoring programme before you get turning to the medical costs.

see also http://www.hse.gov.uk/cancer/about.htm

This is not how insurance should work...

Insurance works by having lots of people (most who will never get ill/crash their car/have their house burn down) pay a little bit - and the money that piles up then goes to those that are unfortunate enough to be the odd ones out that something bad happens to (and the insurance companies get to take a cut- yay).

Once you start insuring only those that are likely to have something bad happen to them, then those people will have to pay a lot more - until insurance no longer makes sense and everyone will just have to save up money in case they get cancer/fire/their legs get stolen.

The next step

The next step will be analytics software that pores over job seekers' health insurance claims and tells bosses whether or not to hire them.

Spin-off?

It's noteworthy that the ability "to spot risk factors for certain conditions" and to "advise ... what preventive care could be used to catch a problem early" is treated as possible spin-off. Aren't these primary aspects of modern health care?

I just read an article about how the NSA uses algorithms to identify terrorists in Pakistan (as well as harmless cell phone users) and target them for death by overhead drone.

Perhaps these two programs could be merged?

I see an enormous potential for health care cost cutting here.