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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (6357)	3/13/2009 5:27:39 PM
From: Lane3	2 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42652

would a savings of $3.5K per year be an 'effective perverse incentive'? What it would be is infeasible.

To: Road Walker who wrote (6357)	3/13/2009 5:36:50 PM
From: TimF	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Say the average insurance premium for a average family is $7K... would a savings of $3.5K per year be an 'effective perverse incentive'? That wouldn't be a perverse incentive but rather a positive incentive. A perverse incentive is when the incentive causes something bad to happen, particularly when the incentive causes the opposite of what your trying to achieve. $3.5K per year can change behavior. But something like regular exercise or good diet are some of the hardest changes to get large percentages of people to make. They don't just require a one time change, but a change every day, day after day. And for the most part not just a passive change (avoiding bad things), but an active change (continually putting effort in to doing the beneficial thing). Your not trying to get someone to do some minor thing their neutral about, but rather something they sort of already want to do (at least in many cases), but find very hard. Your trying to get their higher brain functions to overcome their "primitive brain" desires and compulsions. This is different than perverse (or possibly potentially beneficial) incentives to invest in a certain area, by say targeted tax breaks for that area, where your just trying to make people pick one "higher brain" decision over another. Incentives would probably work best if they are relatively immediate, and if its extremely hard to fake the behavior or reports of the behavior that you want. Something like someone's weight, can't easily be faked (you could bribe the person doing the weighing, but I don't think that's likely to be a serious problem). But weight ignores how much of the weight is fat, and also ignores many other points (someone with a bit of fat but who regularly exercises is probably healthier than someone who just doesn't eat much but never exercises). Also in the short term weight fluctuates. Part of the problem people have maintaining an ideal weight is that there is very little in the way of short term reward of feedback. Exercise is easier to fake. You could have insurance companies or the government buy or make deals with gyms to monitor how often someone goes to the gym, but are you also going to monitor their exercise once they get there? And what about exercise outside of gyms. The monitoring quickly gets very expensive and intrusive.