I wonder... is there any good solution to this issue from either side? Outside of legitimate gender change (bear with me -- I know some of you don't think this is possible but lets go with the assumption) can you really blame the guy? And as an insurance company what can you do about it? I would say maybe we could have flat rates but then that just incentivizes the "good" class to go to an insurer who values their "goodness".
Per the article the EU already banned gender discrimination for insurance rates in 2011. Catch up Canada!
I wonder why it is that car insurance charges higher rates to young males(who on average cost more than young females), but medical insurance as far as I can tell is equally priced for young men and young women, even though young women generally have higher health care costs than young men(primarily through childbirth and greater use of health services).
I don't want to be cynical but I imagine if a health care company in the US or Canada actually did start charging more for some class of young women vs young men, it would make international news and lead to new anti-discrimination laws for health insurance
I noticed the lack of gender having an effect on price... However they are still discriminate on "Title" (Mr, Miss, Mrs). It makes a pretty substantial change to quotes I get.
They also use first name to discriminate. Put in "Wayne", and the quotes are much higher than "Sarah".
It won't harm the insurance companies, as it'll be a level playing field, and they'll all have to simply quote new rates that work out for them given the new data they're allowed to consider. The parties harmed will be, on average, women, whose rates will go up, and the beneficiaries will be, on average, men, especially young men, whose rates will come down.
Oh, good point. Let's also recognize that blacks are more likely to commit violent crimes and have violent crimes committed upon them, so we should be charging them extra for health insurance relative to whites.
Yes it is. Should the cost of car insurance, health insurance, or life insurance vary based on the measured risk from your skin colour, or height for example?
A “lucky” individual has reduced premiums, while an “unlucky” individual has increased premiums, and neither has any control over it! Comparatively, someone benefits and someone suffers (both are undeserved).
After thinking about it, I want to hear from someone who thinks the opposite to me - that it is perfectly fair for someone to pay more and, thus, someone else to pay less, due to a factor that neither has any choice about.
The reason someone would say it is fair is because insurance isn't designed to just be free healthcare our car repairs or whatever. Insurance is a scene designed to deal with the problem that some unlikely events are too expensive to pay for oneself. We pool our money into insurance policies to allow anyone holding the policy to weather such events by the virtue of having guaranteed support from the other policy-holders.
However, for this system to work, each person does need to pay in approximately enough to cover the risk they create to the policy. So yes, more risky people do need to pay more, because they are creating more costs to the policy.
Basically, insurance isn't free healthcare, and we shouldn't be treating it that way.
Yes: see redlining, racial profiling, etc. All of these can be "justified" by appealing to measured risk, but we consider them very discriminatory from both an ethical and a legal perspective.
Think about it, though - what is really being measured? Maybe there's a small subset of super high-risk male drivers who the rest of us are subsidizing. If they were to base my insurance rates on measurable individual characteristics, that would be much less suspect IMO.
Yes, because the risk factor isn't that you're a young male, it is because you are a dangerous driver, which is correlated with young males. But it also means that there are safe driving young men out there who are subsidizing dangerous female drivers.
You raise a thought-provoking point. For example, a company that basis your salary on aptitude tests (or genetic tests - hello Gattica!). It isn’t fair if you didn’t have control over your “intelligence genes” so to say. But, this is very fuzzy right? Your intelligence and aptitude for a job is determined by so many factors, and any tests would struggle to capture the information properly, I think.
By comparison, the car insurance test of gender was straightforward (just look at the letter on the document!). I would hesitate to apply my original statement to such a fuzzy situation.
Yeah I don't have a good answer either. I tend to take a more pragmatic approach, as opposed to a moral one, asking myself, what behaviour do we want to encourage? "Discriminating" based on intelligence => meritocracy => probably good. Young men subsidising pregnant women => possibly good (for Western nations at least). What does discriminating of car insurance do - no idea, possibly discourages men from driving and driving recklessly, but the effect is probably minimal and might not even be there, so...
Let's turn this around, people have characteristics that they don't choose and can't change, but those characteristics have an impact, on average, on some real-life aspects. Would ignoring that be a net gain over whatever would be gained by not ignoring it?
