Kennedy's Wearable Push Echoes Auto Insurance Tracking
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- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told House members in 2025 his "vision is that every American is wearing a wearable in the next four years," claiming devices tracking sleep, heart rate, and glucose will help Americans "take control" of their health.
- The MAHA White House strategy report to "make children healthy again" proposes linking wearable data to electronic health records, and the FDA reclassified AI-enabled wearables in January so they are not treated as heavily regulated medical devices provided they don't claim to diagnose or treat disease.
- Health and life insurance programs including John Hancock's Vitality (developed by South Africa's Discovery Limited) and UnitedHealthcare's Wellness Rewards already offer discounts, gift cards, and points for tracked "good" behaviors.
- Auto insurance telematics programs — Allstate's Drivewise, Geico's DriveEasy, and Progressive's Snapshot — extract braking, time-of-day, and phone-usage data; a Maryland Insurance Administration report found a mixed bag of premium changes with no real overall savings.
- The authors argue wearables promote an individualized view of health that ignores how social structures and inequalities shape disease risk, and that insurers could weaponize consumer data to raise premiums and label individuals "risky."
- An NYC-based family medicine physician cited in the piece said patients who bring wearable data to appointments tend to be the most health-conscious, but it's unclear whether wearables make users more health-conscious — and the data are often inaccurate and not very actionable for doctors.
Why it matters: If MAHA's wearable mandate advances, health insurers gain access to minute-by-minute biometric data on millions of Americans while consumers get no proven cost savings — just as the Maryland report found with auto telematics. The authors argue this shifts financial responsibility onto individuals rather than addressing structural determinants of disease.
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