I mean, do health insurance companies mandate best health practices in order to get health insurance? Of course not, they just charge premiums commensurate with the risk they're taking on.

Interestingly, basing insurance on healthiness seems to be a new trend happening right now.

I'm a runner, and recently I've seen a lot of ads for a company called HealthIQ (I think) that offers cheap life insurance, but only for people who can run a 9 minute mile.

I think breaking into health insurance would be much harder because a) the administration is way more complicated and b) most people get health insurance through their employers, and normal employers won't be able to guarantee that every employee can pass a healthiness test, but I imagine they're working on getting around these problems right now.

Depends on the carrier and plan.

Fully-integrated HMOs (think Kaiser) have extensive tracking and best practices that reduce future risk and liabilities: well mother / we'll baby care and training, vaccinations and nutrition, preventive chechups, monitoring of dangerous conditions, ob/gyn checkups, breast, colon & prostate exams, etc.

There's only so much that individual initiative can accomplish, but systemic measures really can move the needle.

Any insurer will have an initial state you have to meet to get insurancem and they audit that and sign you up. They should then follow up every listed time period (annually, weekly, daily, hourly etc) to make sure you running properly. That way, all you will use is the changes that occur in the listed period. This may mean hourly backups offsite - all you lose is one hour's worth. Then, the insurance company and the insured company must rigorously keep to that routine.Experience shows that people get slack, they skip backups and other forms of lazy boys at work - they still cash their paychecks very regularly though - never skip that. Tis is a typical civil service operation. highly paid union people locked into their jobs, their IT knowledge frozen in time years back and useless now. Older 'rusty' people can not be fired, so that current IT capable new people can be hired, and if you hire a consultant it will also be unionised (Yes, Toronto has a law that says that). so they stumble on until shit happens. Quite a few escape this fate, get good IT people and keep it up, these idiots are a rare exception

Probably they haven't been hit hard so far...