Here is an idea that I did not see coming -- wearable health monitoring devices like the Apple Watch as a means for lowering your health insurance costs (see: The Real Reason You'll Want An Apple Watch: Your Health Insurance Will Go Down). The details are in a excerpt of an article I came across:
Last week...[at a conference, we] bumped into a venture capitalist investing lots of money into startups in the healthcare space. We asked her what the coolest healthcare application for the Apple Watch will be. Her answer: apps that connect your body to your health insurance company. She offered, as an example, the car insurance industry. Right now insurance companies offer gadgets that you install in your car. These monitor how you drive — whether you stay inside the speed limit, brake too much, and generally obey traffic laws.If you're a safe driver, insurance companies will cut the rates you pay on car insurance. The same thing will happen for Apple Watch, this startup investor predicts. Apple Watch applications will monitor how you sleep, how much you exercise, and what you eat. If you follow certainly guidelines, your health insurance premiums will go down. No doubt some people will find this idea very creepy. Some of us will be glad to pay less to Aetna every two weeks — over longer lives.
Snapshot is the device referred to in the article above. It's provided by Progressive Insurance and plugs into your car, monitors various aspects of your driving habits, notably speed, and on this basis then allows the company to offer discounts to the safest drivers (see: Great drivers get GREAT RATES with Snapshot). Here is the time-line provided by the company on their web site about how all of this is accomplished:
Day 1: The Snapshot device fits right into a little port in your car, generally located below the steering wheel.
Days 1-30: We look at your driving habits to see if you could be saving more. You can track your projected savings online.
Day 31: Now your rate is fully personalized; any discount you earned is in full effect.
An analogy has been made between Apple Watch and Snapshot such that the former can monitor various parameters of one's health which enables you then to qualify for lower health insurance rates. I am sure that a wearable device such as Apple Watch can measure frequency of exercise, pulse, blood pressure, and perhaps even blood sugar in the near future. However, I am not sure about the assessment of two of the most important health measures now used to qualify for lower insurance rates -- BMI and smoking history. At any rate, the basic idea is definitely worth consideration.
Comments