I want a member's claim paid on a difficult day, and their details absent from records the fund never needed.
The first claim I processed in code was for a pair of spectacles. In February 1997 I joined Kestrelby Systems in Adelaide as a graduate programmer, three months after finishing a computer science degree at Tellebrook University. Kestrelby wrote membership and claims software for small health funds, several with fewer than twenty thousand members. My first assignment was the routine that checked an optical benefit against an annual limit. The limit sounded simple until I learnt that it could be shared across a family, reset on a calendar or membership year depending on the fund, and reduced by a claim paid months earlier at a different counter. I came to respect product rules as the place where an insurer's promise becomes arithmetic.
Members judge a health fund at the counter, usually when they are unwell or worried about a bill. I would rather offer them a slower service that works when part of our technology fails than a faster one that simply stops. I also believe that every record we keep about a person must earn its place, because a stored record cannot be stolen once it has been destroyed.