BountyBunny: Making Health Insurance Work for Everybody

• In Event: The Future Will Be Terrible

Abstract

(NB. Our one note of optimism is the assumption that the ACA is restored to full functionality by a democratic house, thus restoring insurance markets.)

We are pitching an app called BountyBunny, which works as a loyalty program for insurance companies that a) incentivizes healthy behaviors in policy holders, b) increases insurers’ access to relevant biometric data about them and c) helps mitigate the rate of default on bills.

BountyBunny is free for users, and so rewarding they’ll line up to sign up! It combines the convenience of TaskRabbit with the fitness tracking of FitBit. It tracks both physical and transactional activity of your policy holders (or “athletes”) as they complete requested tasks for other users (or “taskers.”)

As in TR, your policy holders are hired by taskers on an as-needed basis to complete various physically active tasks in exchange for financial compensation (or “bounty.”) In addition to these one-time third party payments, athletes are rewarded both by quantifiable information about improvements in their own physical fitness (as through Fitbit) and by creating a record of physical activity that can eventually lower their premiums.

Even better, athletes can put their compensation directly into a reserve bank for health insurance costs, ensuring that they’ll never come up short when there’s an unexpected bill. (Insurer-clients may wish to incentivize this by adding a 5% enhancement to all compensation directed toward this reserve bank.)

As an added bonus, athletes can choose to waive their task fee (and make their services available to taskers at a reduced rate) in order to establish a record of altruism. This option both creates an alternative revenue stream for the insurer-client and helps create metrics for making difficult decisions about whose costs to underwrite in cases of limited resources (such as donor organs.)


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This app combines the most insidious aspects of incentivized surveillance capitalism with the gig economy and biopolitical markets. We are also pretty sure it would sell!

Author

• Emanuelle Burton, University of Illinois at Chicago