Thanks, Ziggy. scrabbler, choose any word you want. Approach, strategy, tactics, blueprint, process.
Health insurance is something every single person requires from before conception (needs a healthy mother) to death, without exception. The risk pool is the entire universe. This is unique to health insurance and not the case in any other type of insurance.
Large group insurance does not segment by age, it requires enrollment of the entire universe and applies one single risk assessment. Community rated Medicare does the same. This insurance is pricey but costs the same for everyone and works well.
US individual and small group health insurance is built on a model of exclusion. Prior to the ACA, it simply excluded some individuals. It still does, by selling products to some residents (groups, seniors) and not others (individuals) in the same geography.
Age based segmentation is a practice that allows insurers to define a segment that excludes most people but allows them to offer an artificially low price for one segment where they want to compete. This effectively makes their product unaffordable to the other segments, so demand is low, which is totally acceptable to the insurers. It's a design point.
All this segmentation allows the insurers to pick apart the market to select and sell where they want to, even though the need is universal. It is a destructive force. Employer large group and Medicare, which cover more than 1/2 the coutry, show that age segmentation is not needed.