The obvious, naive answer would be
to take all incidents, tally the cost, add overhead margin, divide by number of insured, and that's your premium. No questions asked. The only way left for these respectable gamblers to compete would be on reducing the overhead, leaving their profit as a function of how efficient they are at settling and administration and stuff.
Of course, this won't happen. But ideally, it should. Equallity for all. Maybe I can call this initiative misguided on grounds of insisting on equal outcome, not equal opportunity, even when you (or at least a supposedly learned lawyer in an influential position ought to) know you'll never get it. The road to hell and all that.
I think we need to come off the notion that discrimination is a dirty word. If that's the case then the knob on metal detectors labeled "discriminator" maybe needs to be labeled "racist", too. And sold in packages with big warning labels announcing it to be an un-pc, racist device. This not because the phenomenon that we're trying to stamp out is any less bad, but because we're deluding ourselves as to what it is, really. So perhaps we'll need to find a more specific word instead of repurposing a generic word for some specific thing, obscuring just how specific that thing is, really.
The problem is discrimination humans on grounds that have no demonstratable bearing on the subject nor the results to the person. Refusing to serve people in a restaurant because of their skin colour or their sex is something most of us will agree is a silly notion. Refusing to cast a white woman for a film role that calls for a black man is, OTOH, defensible. Even if hollywood script writers have this nasty habit of doing unspeakable things to their source material. But I digress.
The thing is, this shutting out our fellow human on some silly criterion --And I'll readily admit I have tendencies just as bad that sometimes conciously have to be kept in check; I'm just as fallible a human as (most of) the rest of us.-- is a social mechanism that might even be baked into our "clannish" genes; there's evidence that people without a certain gene also lack the tendency.
The Advocate General probably was after this disguised as a "valid" statistical technique, just like the measuring of scalps relating to race and religion turned out to be so much scientific bunk. But I think I'll agree she has overdone it a bit, as there are good arguments for proclaiming the statistical techniques to not having risen out of the social tendency.
That all needn't necessarily validate the statistical techniques --though for better or for worse they've been in use for a while and are generally accepted in the industry-- but at least would invalidate the presupposition that they need to be hit with the "anti-discrimiation" banhammer.
I think dear ms. Advocate General has some explaining to do.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
