The Underwriting Blackbox Must Open

Why digital-first does not mean customer-first — and what a living health partnership actually looks like. This Guardian Insurer Series paper exposes how transparent-looking digital insurance front-ends can still hide opaque underwriting logic, issuing permanent exclusions in undefined language with no meaningful appeal pathway. Using the Bowtie case as evidence, it argues that prevention without empathy feels like surveillance and underwriting without transparency feels like a trap.