What could be effective strategies for policymakers to reduce the lock-in effect for high-risk individuals?
A confinement of the role of supplementary insurance to 'luxury' benefits (e.g. cosmetic surgery, spa treatments, first class hospital services) would make this type of insurance dispensable also for high-risk individuals, which would reduce the lock-in effect.
As long as health insurers face incentives for risk selection in basic insurance, strategies to reduce the lock-in effect for high-risk individuals may be counteracted by increasing use of supplementary insurance as a selection device.
A third strategy to reduce the lock-in effect for high-risk individuals would be to monitor insurers' underwriting practices and to make the results public, as is in the Netherlands annually done by both the Netherlands Patients and Consumers Federation NPCFF) and the Dutch Healthcare Authority (NZa).
For example, the emergence of Google Photos as an application across Android and iOS significantly reduces the lock-in of Photos, the emergence of Spotify reduces the lock-in of iTunes, and the emergence of Drive and Dropbox reduces the lock-in of iCloud.
When a combination of the above-mentioned strategies is effective in reducing the lock-in effect, high-risk individuals will encounter less restrictions to switch to another basic and supplementary insurance contract.
The main difficulty is to reduce the locking phenomenon arising in bending dominated situations without destroying the ability of the procedure to accurately capture membrane dominated and mixed behaviors.
Effective triangular shell elements are of utmost interest in engineering practice, and the MITC6a element – a 6 node quadratic general shell element of the MITC family – has been shown to significantly reduce the locking phenomena arising in bending dominated behaviours.
Tools are emerging that address building out a consistent application or service model to reduce the proprietary lock-in risks stemming from customized scripting while improving deployment success due to more-predictable configurations.
Therefore, providers need to ensure the privacy and confidentiality of their customers' data, employ comprehensive costing models, in addition to complying with relevant standards to reduce the risks of vendor lock-in.
We strongly believe that the implementation of these strategies has a great potential to reduce the risks of vendor lock-in.
