The Big Business of Intrusion
I provide HR support for a small employer in rural Minnesota. We have 25 employees, a family-type environment, and a relatively laid-back attitude when it comes to time off requests and early departures for family functions.
Currently, the company is shopping for new health insurance policies. I have some experience in this process, and also some very strong opinions on the intrusive nature of the insurance industry’s data collection practices. They ask all new potential customers to fill out highly detailed, more info than I would give my own mother, questionnaires, which are mandatory. These forms also include verbiage like, “incomplete answers will be considered false and may result in the termination of the entire process,” just to scare wavering employees into compliance.
To quote a really good article from www.citizen.org, “ The use of these forms, however, makes clear that insurance companies are doing their best not to sell insurance, but to sell prepaid services to people who are unlikely to need much medical treatment or, at worst, who will only need fairly predictable and inexpensive services. As a result, these companies are no longer in the business of spreading risk, but of avoiding risk.”
Avoiding risk. Seems reasonable, right? Now I won’t go as far as the Citizen article and call for single-payer healthcare for the United States (I consider myself a libertarian) but I will say this… our healthcare system is broken.
Big Pharma and their kickbacks for writing high numbers of Rx’s are winning the game, and the losing team is made up of your grandmother, your children, and all of the employees I work with who are dealing with chronic illness, taking so many medications they can’t even remember the names or what treats what.

So, who is really at risk here? Would the insurance company go out of business if they simply accepted people onto their policies without forcing individuals to divulge their deepest darkest secrets? Would the company I work for be forced completely out of the market if they refused to do business with insurers who violate their employee’s right to keep private information private? And when the news reports on Congress’ progress on repealing and replacing “Obamacare,” I can’t help but wonder if they are actually thinking about how ludicrous it is to force people into a broken-ass system that only takes advantage of the weakest people in our society.
I wish I had a better solution.
