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W: What you pay for health insurance is increasingly a complex web of formulas. And now, your personal data, everything from where you live to what clothing you buy may factor into what you pay or whether you get coverage at all. Joining us now is Pro-Publica reporter Marshall Allen. He is here to tell us why insurance companies take in our personal information.  Welcome!
    M: Good evening.
    W: First, tell us, what sorts of data are insurance companies looking at?
    M: Well, that’s a good question. They’re looking at all different types of personal and proprietary and public information.
    W: But these kinds of things are what people would normally assume to be private.
    M: Exactly. And I bet probably most of the viewers in your audience right now are having their data gathered by the data brokers that are teaming up with the health insurance companies to analyze this.
    W: But why would insurance companies collect our personal data at all? After all, they are not advertisers. And what would be included in the data that they’re gathering?
    M: Well, that would include your education record, your property records, any debts you might have, your income level, your race and ethnicity. Even social media interactions. They’re gathering all this information, and then they make predictions about how much we might cost based on all these economic and lifestyle attributes.
    W: So that is related to their insurance business, isn’t it?
    M: Yes, it is. We now have a term for that—"Precision Marketing" , which emphasizes relevance as part of the technique. To achieve relevance, Precision Marketing marketers solicit personal preferences directly from recipients. They also collect and analyze behavioral and transactional data.  In this case, insurance companies collect personal data for future business.
    W: But could you give us some examples?
    M: Well, for example, if you’re a low-income minority, they would assume that you are living in a dangerous and obsolete neighborhood, and so you could be at higher risk of health cost.
    W: I get it. So if I have bought plus-size clothing, they would predict that I might be more likely to be depressed, which could also lead to higher health care costs. Am I right?
    M: Exactly. These are things that they’re looking at, trends in the data for groups of people, and then they’re attributing the inferences to individuals within that group.  But one of the fundamental problems is that for any individual, this could just be wrong.
    W: Yes. So they’re scoring us and predicting our health care costs based on the groups that we fall into instead of taking us personally.
    M: And when I talked to the industry, I mean they promise that they’re only using this information for the purpose of helping people. So that what they would say, the argument for doing this is that they can do better case management. But, just as it could be used for good, it could also be used to discriminate. And, the health insurance industry has a long history of discriminating against sick people. That still goes on to this day.
    W: I agree. Thanks for joining us today.
    1. What is this interview mainly about?
    2. According to the interviewee, what data do insurance companies collect?
    3. What does Precision Marketing emphasize?
    4. Why do insurance companies take in people’s personal information?
    5. What can we learn about insurance industry?