Those of us trying to lose some pounds after overindulging this holiday season can get help from a slew of smartphone apps that count steps climbed and calories burned. Self-tracking has also become a way for companies to make money using your fitness data. And some experts worry that the data collected could be used against users in the long run.
This kind of defeats the purpose of a health insurance system. The whole way a risk pool functions is that most individuals pay more than they receive in benefits, so that those who need to cash out can receive benefits during those catastrophic health crises nobody can reasonably pay for out of pocket. The more the insurance industry focuses on lowering premiums for low-consuming patients and raising them for high-consuming patients, the more they incentivize a switch away from traditional health insurance toward plans like the HRA/HSA and high-deductible catastrophic insurance combo (a plan which I've decided to use for the first time in 2013). Not that I'll cry any rivers when traditional risk pool based health insurance dies a lonely death and/or becomes a last-choice option only used by people who grew up with it and are change-averse. It's a shitty system.