Health Credit Scores: Less Risk, More Reward · Thu Jul 13, 03:01 PM by Martin H. Bosworth

A company called Canopy Financial has announced a specific credit score for health care lending. The score integrates with the monetary obligations that come with Health Savings Accounts (HSA’s).

Using this system, if you’re going for one of those wacky high-deductible plans and want to establish or change your HSA (the ins and outs of which are very well explained here), when you look for your quote, the lenders using this new credit score will factor in your—what’s the bloodless terminology they use?...“risk profile.”

This is really just a new twist on the same old game…ferreting out people who are the most needing of insurance and denying it to them, while pushing plans on people who are in good health and make money. Someone once said that the health insurance business was convincing people to pay for a service and then denying it to them when they ask for it.

The idea of “customer segmentation” is the same kind of mercenary pursuit the credit industry uses to identify people who’re most likely to default on credit card debt—they’re the ones that lenders make money off of through late fees, overlimit fees, etc. Why do you think the newly bankrupt get slammed with credit card offers?

I may be misunderstanding the ins and outs of the HSA quote process, since I don’t have one. Hopefully someone’ll provide some clarity there, but from here, it just looks like another way to make money out of screwing people.

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