"Life insurers can predict when you'll die with about 98% accuracy."
This conclusion isn't supported by the linked document. The document instead is talking about expected vs actual deaths among demographic groups as a whole, not individual people. And that expected vs actual is just history + trends. This doesn't mean that insurance can say that Joe Blow is going to die in June of 2027 with "98% accuracy", obviously.
You definitely (at least in the US) need income (or an income proxy like zip code). Mississippi has a life expectancy ~10 years less than Massachusettes.
This typically has surprisingly little impact on force of mortality.
Men under 40 essentially have incredibly low mortality. Once you exclude cars and suicide it drops basically to zero.
Even things that are very very bad for you, like being very obese (BMI>40), are factors that scale a mortality that is massively dominated by age and sex. Even 3x mortality at 25 rounds to zero. At 60 background become 1% per year and a 3x increase would make a huge difference.
I would wager $50 that there are no contiguous collection of zip codes in the USA where the average 40 year old has a higher life expectancy than the average 30 year old in any other contiguous set of zip codes assuming there are over 1000 people of that age in both.
Yeah that was a bizarre line in the article. Not to mention it's meaningless because it doesn't say within what time interval. But even if you assume a year (i.e. predict your age of death) it's obviously false. Life insurers are very much not predicting the year an individual will die and getting it right 98% off the time. That would be absurd.
Unless the preson in question is over 102 years. IIRC that is roughly the age when mortality rates on average surpass 50% per year. Up until tha age you can celebrate your birthday and reasonably expect is more likely to still be alive by the next than not.
They can predict it in the sense most people will die within some specified window in which the insurer makes a profit. This is why its so profitable for the insurer. They have a very wide window where it's profitable and the vast majority of people, 98%, fall within this window. .
"Life insurers can predict when you'll die with about 98% accuracy."
This conclusion isn't supported by the linked document. The document instead is talking about expected vs actual deaths among demographic groups as a whole, not individual people. And that expected vs actual is just history + trends. This doesn't mean that insurance can say that Joe Blow is going to die in June of 2027 with "98% accuracy", obviously.