I don't know that I'm qualified to make decisions about how people live their lives and the impact that will have on their costs in the future. All the genetic and environmental factors would have to be taken into account and I'm simply not knowledgeable enough to write the algorithms to analyze it. I don't work in health care, but I would be comfortable writing to specifications. Nonetheless, I think the human factor has to come into play somewhere, which would require manual intervention by a human to assess risk factors and benefits from lifestyle.

The other problem is that we don't fully understand everything about how the human body works, so any conclusions we draw would be based on the understanding of the people who designed the algorithms at they time they designed them. I think the way US health insurance companies assess people is simplistic but very flawed. The best example I can give is a guy with whom I work. At 47 years old, he's in phenomenal shape. He not only runs marathons, but also completes iron man competitions. The all-knowing health insurance company determined that he was overweight. You certainly wouldn't know it by looking at him. Clearly, someone has something wrong somewhere, but the bureaucracy had already made the decision.