Moral Hazard

Moral hazard is a term used in the insurance industry to describe the behavioural response of the feeling that one is protected or invulnerable and therefore can relax the need for vigilance.

This attitude is responsible for the amazing ability of people to subvert technological advances, so well described in Edward Tenner's book, "Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the revenge of unintended consequences."

While Tenner gives numerous examples of unintended consequences, he does not address why these occur. To explain why we have to return to a ancient concept popularly known as The Seven Deadly Sins.

Moral hazard has not yet been applied extensively to medicine. Until recently diseases were mostly infectious in origin. People had very little individual control over disease occurence. Except for the sexually transmitted diseases, individual behaviour had little influence on the chances of getting a common fatal disease. However, the technological advances that led to the elimination of most pandemic infections by immunization and the sanitary measures limiting their dissemination have led to the belief that all disease can be cured if enough technology is applied. The only developed society that has not been lured by this deception is Japan and the Japanese have the longest healthy life expectancy of any large country in the world. And Japan spends on its "health care" system about half of what the US does.