The engineer in me immediately looks for ways to map out how tax avoidance via crypto trading on life insurance funds via a Bermuda company can possibly go wrong. Insurance has a nice long term cash flow that has proved very sweet for Berkshire Hathaway, and investment on top of that gets perks for the insurance. However Crypto, which has liquidity issues and is heavily scammed/stolen would benefit far more than the users of business. The holdings would stay for decades, allowing arbitrage of the main company with user investments. If there is a leak or a collapse of the crypto, the customers won’t know it until they can’t get their funds back, but since AI is handling the claims, they may never even find out the real reason they can’t get their money back. And since it’s life insurance, the buyer might never find out, while their descendants or loved ones may not know how to deal with it or be plenty confused by the lack of customer service. Very novel scheme.
How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup
141–150 of 192 posts
Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup
#142Lots of people are misreading this post.
The key phrase is LIFE Insurance, not HEALTH Insurance!
They are vastly different markets.
You don’t deny claims for life insurance as companies would do for health insurance. It’s a very different set of circumstances to have to deny life insurance.
Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI adjudication of healthcare is fine but there needs to be extremely steep consequences for false negatives and a truly independent board of medical experts to appeal to. If a large panel agrees the denial was wrong, a penalty of 10-100x the cost of procedure would be assessed depending on the consequence of the denial.
No one is going to accept a claim rejection from AI. Everyone will want to dispute, which will have to go to a human to review. At the end of the day I don’t see how 100 people is realistic.
This reaction is primarily an emotional one. Why is a human rejecting a claim better than an AI rejecting a claim? Presumably the AI will one day -- if not today -- be more accurate in following decisioning logic than humans, who will continue to make human errors.
Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see it as inherently a problem; AI can (theoretically) be a lot more fair in dealing with claims, and responds a lot sooner. That said I suspect the founder is seriously overestimating the number of highly intelligent, competent people he can hire, and underestimating how much bureaucratic nonsense comes with insurance, but that's a problem he'll run into later down the road. Sometimes you have to hire three…
> AI can (theoretically) be a lot more fair in dealing with claims Respectfully, no it can't. From a Western perspective, specifically American, and from an average middle-class person's perspective, specifically American, it only appears to be fair. However, LLMs are a codification of internet and written content, largely by English speakers for English speakers. There are <400m people in the US and ~8b in the world…
> LLMs are a codification of internet and written content
Only true for pre-trained foundational models without any domain-specific augmentations. A good AI tool in this space would be fine-tuned or have other mechanisms that overshadow the pre-training from internet content.
Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup
#145> Meanwhile: to break into a highly-regulated, commoditized market like insurance, you need both a truly differentiated product that incumbents can't easily replicate and an associated distribution strategy that leverages their blind spots. Having worked in highly regulated industries, I’ve learned that the best way to disrupt incumbents is by creating a product that assumes more business risk than is typically accep…
What if you take that risk by putting "crypto" in it? I think it might work out for our founder here but I am not so optimistic about the results for any of the poor schmucks suckered into this scheme.
Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI adjudication of healthcare is fine but there needs to be extremely steep consequences for false negatives and a truly independent board of medical experts to appeal to. If a large panel agrees the denial was wrong, a penalty of 10-100x the cost of procedure would be assessed depending on the consequence of the denial.
No one is going to accept a claim rejection from AI. Everyone will want to dispute, which will have to go to a human to review. At the end of the day I don’t see how 100 people is realistic.
If that were true then they would also dispute every first-line human review. I don't think the average first-line human customer service rep is any better than AI even today.
Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup
#147Article is interesting on the whole (I have no experience with "professional" work, and would love for suggestions as to how to be more familiar), but I latched onto this nugget: > Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management. We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and a…
AI adjudication of healthcare is fine but there needs to be extremely steep consequences for false negatives and a truly independent board of medical experts to appeal to. If a large panel agrees the denial was wrong, a penalty of 10-100x the cost of procedure would be assessed depending on the consequence of the denial.
Or, and here's the wild thing, put all these parasites, leeches, and other useless middle-men out of a job and just go single-payer.
Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup
#148Article is interesting on the whole (I have no experience with "professional" work, and would love for suggestions as to how to be more familiar), but I latched onto this nugget: > Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management. We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and a…
I don't think there an ethical responsibility to worrying about your competitor's labor. That would lead to stagnation and it's own sort of ethical issues.
The whole ugly turn of AI hypemen claiming its somehow morally okay for everyone to lose their jobs all at once makes me think the Luddites were right all along
Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see it as inherently a problem; AI can (theoretically) be a lot more fair in dealing with claims, and responds a lot sooner. That said I suspect the founder is seriously overestimating the number of highly intelligent, competent people he can hire, and underestimating how much bureaucratic nonsense comes with insurance, but that's a problem he'll run into later down the road. Sometimes you have to hire three…
You're incredibly naive if you think AI will be used to pay out claims more fairly instead of being used as a deny-bot.
Why? There are many tasks where AI beats humans. Humans are also prone to bias and fatigue etc.
Although I would still agree that there would need to be a mechanism for escalation to a human.
Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup
#150Insurance business is mostly about hoarding and investing money so you can actually pay when you have to.
Unless you can solve that part of the problem as well as the big players, you will run into problems at some point, using extrem value theory you can even estimate when.