https://www.tiktok.com/@distilledscience/video/7641359688788888863
Hut-take, universal health care is going to be absolutely required based on the current trajectory of scientific advancement. That means no more for-profit insurance companies. Hear me out. Because if you think about it, at its core, insurance is basically people pooling risk together. If one person in 100 is likely to have a car accident, then they all pool their money together so that the one person that happens to doesn't get completely wiped out, so that if something bad does happen to them, then they benefit from everyone else's contributions, and the insurance company takes a piece of it. Insurance originated way back in the day. Well, there's some ancient versions of it, but some of the earliest real insurance companies were underwriting merchants to go on long, overrout, overland voyages, or especially sea voyages, which were extremely risky, and lots of ships just wouldn't come back. So in order to pool their risk, they created the whole concept of insurance. But at its core, it's still only really relevant when the negative thing that can happen is random, because that's the incentive for these companies to then want to pool together the risk. But if you could perfectly predict which ships would get lost and which ones would survive, then no underwriter is ever going to say, oh, yeah, I'm going to pull my money for my ship, which I know is not going to go down. And that's what's happening with health care, slowly and should. surely. We're still far away. But, for example, I just saw a study where they developed a blood test that can detect some signs of depression, which is amazing because it's so hard to diagnose, and a lot of people get feeling bad when they go to the doctor about it, or they don't get looked at in the right way, and that's a whole different problem. But if we actually could detect depression reliably based on a simple blood test, then suddenly an insurance company, who knows the potential other negative health impacts of depression, might start taking that into account as a pre-existing condition that could be shown under blood test, and therefore, it'll raise the insurance premiums for those people. Even more worrisome, the Gadica situation where if someone has a DNA test, and that could very reliably predict their risk of a ton of other health conditions, then we could get into a situation where insurance companies would start needing the DNA to first get submitted. But across the board, in order for us to really do a perfect job at medicine, this does, involved extremely sophisticated diagnostic tests, which let us test for the odds of getting a condition and ideally eventually get to the point of perfectly predicting who's going to get what, when, so that we can best try to prevent it. But as soon as we can perfectly predict who is going to need the health care dollars, then the entire insurance industry breaks down. They will have no profit, no incentive to pool money to only give to the people who are going to need it. health issues other than the random things like falling off a cliff. But that's not the majority of times when insurance is needed. So the people who know that they are not going to have any of the chronic conditions would all want to get clumped into the very low-risk security insurance blanket, and that already means that there's way less money to handle the people with the worse genetic or environmental risk factors. All this is to say that for an ethical society that wants to not be able to be able to be able to judge people based on their preconceived risks, really we will need to get to a place where every single person is just part of their life and contribution to government puts in money, and then from a top-down, everyone gets access to appropriate medical coverage and care. And in so doing, private insurance is essentially wiped out, which I'm excited for.
Additional notes
What will AI do to health insurance? We might be in for some scary times before things get better. What do you think will happen? #science #health #ai #learnontiktok #tiktoklearningcampaign
References
- Blood-test-for-depression study is discussed in the transcript, but no study title, DOI, PMID, or direct source link was available in the workbook row.
- Insurance history/background is discussed in the transcript, but no direct source link was available in the workbook row.
- Gattaca/genetic-risk analogy is discussed in the transcript; no study source is listed in the workbook row.