Opinion Insurers Want to Know How Many Steps You Took Today

Before the A.C.A., data brokers bought data from pharmacies and sold it to insurance companies, which would then deny coverage based on prescription histories. Future uses of data in insurance will not be so straightforward. As machine learning works its way into more and more decisions about who gets coverage and what it costs, discrimination becomes harder to spot. Part of the problem is the automatic deference that society has so often given to technology, as though artificial intelligence is unerring. But the other problem is that artificial intelligence is known to reproduce biases that aren't explicitly coded into it.