Thoughts on Insurance
&gt; Insurance carriers set their rates based on actuarial models designed to predict the likelihood of future events.<p>Sure, until the government says that you are no longer allowed to set rates based on actuarial data; maybe you aren&#x27;t allowed to charge people appropriately if they have some expensive &quot;pre-existing condition&quot;, or because of certain &quot;protected&quot; but statistically relevant characteristics. This throws a big fat spanner into the whole expectation value thing, because you&#x27;re no longer an insurance company but a weird privatized subsidy pool that isn&#x27;t allowed to make expectimax decisions anymore.<p>Your clients aren&#x27;t allowed to expectimax anymore either; if they catch on to the fact that they&#x27;re actually subsidizing someone else, they&#x27;re not allowed to form their own rational insurance pool (because it would violate restrictions on &quot;discrimination&quot;, e.g. ACA section 1557) and if they choose to opt out of the irrational &quot;insurance&quot;&#x2F;subsidy market you hit them with a hefty fine.<p>I encourage everyone to look up expectation values for payin&#x2F;payout of medical insurance for different customer types under current regulations (start with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC1361028&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC1361028&#x2F;</a> ). TL;DR If you&#x27;re a reasonably healthy man below retirement age, you&#x27;re getting screwed hard. Maybe society can collectively agree that this is a good idea, but we should at least be honest and stop referring to it as &quot;insurance&quot;. Actual insurance markets without coercion are a net positive for all participants, rather than a convoluted scheme to (effectively) transfer money from one demographic to another.