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UK Insurance Co. Admits Using Genetic Screening
Cletusthesjyokel writes "Interesting read on how one of Britain's biggest insurance companies admitted to using unapproved genetic screening when deciding when to give coverage or not. Makes you think."
"Insurance cannot protect you from everything bad. It can only protect you from things which nobody can predict."
Ummm...No. Insurance exists to mitigate risk. It mitigates risk by spreading risk-associated costs among a large body of payors. That an insurance company makes a profit is a direct result of it's skill at *pricing* and *predicting* the odds of particular risks. If it were true that insurance can only protect against "unpredictable" events, then there would be no way to price it, would there? What would you pay for protection against an unknown and unpredictable risk?
"If you can predict it but the insurance company cannot...you can exploit the insurance company's ignorance. If this happens often enough, then the insurance company cannot make money, and goes out of business."
Uh-huh. And if the insurance company can predict and you cannot, then the insurance company can take advantage of your ignorance. Who goes out of business then? And who has (or would gladly pay to compile) the large statistical databases on risk categories associated with particular genetic loci? This information won't be free.
"Instead, insurance works to buy an unwanted risk from you. In order to price this risk fairly, the insurance company has to understand the risk."
Indeed. And when the "risk" no longer becomes a "risk"--but rather, a certainty--what happens then? If you, as an insurance company, know that a person will come down with alzheimer's (or any other expensive, terminal disease, for that matter), do you take on that person as a customer? Sure--but only if he/she pays as much as their disease will cost, on average. In this case, what are you selling? Snake oil.
"If it cannot understand the risk...then it must charge more for the insurance. Guess who pays this cost? Yep, all insurance customers do."
To wit, I refer you to my original point--insurance exists to mitigate risk, not eliminate it. Yes, we all pay for the fellow down the road with AIDS, or the woman in the next county with Lymphoma. But we're paying to mitigate our own risk as well--in the event that we should develop Lymphoma or AIDS, we know that we'll be helped by our neighbors' payments. The insurance companies make money from this scheme by calculating risks in aggregate, and adding on a chip for the house, so to speak.
Obviously, the better the "house" gets at calculating odds, the better their margins are going to be. But when the house *knows* of an outcome in advance, it becomes a game of "give me your money, and I'll give you a 0% chance of getting it back." This is the promise of genetic information--the house will know of the outcome in advance, and will be able to pick and choose who plays so that nobody wins. And that's just theft, in my book.
Putting all ethical judgement aside, this shows that you have a good reason to go out and buy life insurance now, before genetic screening becomes commonplace.
Even if you don't have a family yet: if you think you will have one, buy life insurance now.
Financial advisors generally recommend having 6-8 times your yearly salary. Better make that 6-8 times what you think you'll be making at the peak of your career, instead of 6-8 times what you're making now.
If you're young, in good health, and a non-smoker, term life insurance is pretty cheap. You can get half a million for a few hundred dollars a year.
And employers: you should be offering life insurance as a benefit to your employees. Offering insurance to groups is a good way for insurance companies to mitigate the problem of adverse selection.
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Compulsory State Insurance.
Just like it's done in Canada, for example.
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The only problem I see with this is that they weren't upfront about it.
There is a widespread belief that insurance companies discriminating against someone because they have a genetic predisposition to a particular disease is somehow "wrong", and I don't get WHY. Insurance companies, like any other business, can only survive if their income exceeds their outlay. The natural response for ANY business must be to focus on reducing outlay. If you're an insurance company, you do that by refusing to cover sick people. This is why we take health exams when we want to buy large life insurance policies. This is why I pay more for my insurance because I'd smoked for a few years. Health insurance is like a big money pool, and the best way to make sure that there's enough money to go around is to limit the amount of money any one person can take out of it.
And if you have somebody who is likely to develop a MAJOR problem because of a genetic problem? Well, you just don't let them in. There are high-rate programs to cover people with pre-existing conditions, and they'll have to join them like anyone else would who had a pre-existing disease. While I'm sure that some people will shout about the "unfairness" of paying more because of a genetic disorder, it must be pointed out that they will also be USING more insurance than the average healthy person. Blame nature, not the insurance company.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
I find it interesting that you equate Britain's rising crime rate a gun control problem. You seem to all-to-easily associate crime with lack of privately owned guns.
If you speak to a Brit you will find that the rising level of crime has tied in quite astoundingly with the decline in amount of police officers. Back in the good old days being a policeman was an attractive job prospect. The pay was very good and there were excellent benefits. Unfortunately it hasn't kept up with the times and being a police officer is nowhere near as attractive as it used to be. Hence falling police numbers, hence rising crime.
To give you an example. In my Parents' hometown (Kenilworth, Warwickshire) the local police station no longer has a policeman in the evening. So, if anything happens in Kenilworth the Police have to be called from nearby Leamington, about 20 mins away. I think just about any crime can be done in 20 minutes. Compare this to five years ago, where an office could be called from the local station 2 minutes away.
This is why crime is rising in Britain. Anyway, do you really think we should trust our neighbours, with the common man's dubious knowledge of the law, with crime prevention or should we trust those who are trained in the very letter of the law? That, IMHO, is the difference between a Brit and someone from the US. In Britain we see the Police as those who uphold the law. IMHO those from the US want the ability to take the law into their owns hands, which is all well and good as long as everyone knows EXACTLY what the law is.
You are, in the end, pretty confused. First of all, the human condition is that wants always exceed the ability to fulfill them. This is not necessarily bad. I want an Open Source page layout program.
Second of all, in a free market, a monopolist can only keep her monopoly by continuing to compete more efficiently than anyone else. Fail to compete, and the market will discard you like last year's pop music star.
Third, most of your complaints are due to too much government regulation, not too little. Sure, if a monopoly can use government to hinder the freedom of the market, then it's not subject to correction. And that's bad. Any free-market economist will tell you that it's bad. But the solution is not more regulation, it's less. Why? Because when you pass regulations, the regulatee inevitably has a greater interest than anyone else, and so can apply political power to affect the regulations to help them. Very, very often, corporations welcome regulation. Regulation hinders the market, and lets corporations achieve greater profits than a free market would support.
Anyway, learn more about economics and you'll see where you're wrong.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I have no problem with an Insurance company saying "Look, moron, until you quit smoking you're paying an extra $ amount for us to insure your life, cuz you're killing yourself." Smoking and other self-destructive behaviour I can change - my genetic make-up I CANNOT. This is tantamount to the US Government saying "Seeing as this particular group (OK, I'm being P.C. here..) statistically has a tendancy to commit crimes, we'll get the cops to pay special attention to them." Oops, bad example. ;)
Except that it's not the government, it's a company, which doesn't have to treat you equally and fair. Insurance companies already discriminate against males by jacking up car insurance premiums.
I wouldn't find this to normally be a problem, however car insurance is REQUIRED to drive, so essentially when it comes right down to it the government is discriminating by association.
But this is life insurance, you don't really need life insurance, so you really are screwed.
-- iCEBaLM
If genetic "selection" by insurance companies isn't prohibited by laws then what? Next employers will want to know if an applicant is likely to develop alcoholism (just as an example) or any diseases that might disrupt their work. So a social underclass is created (Gattaca although it's all over the discussion is too good an example not to use), parents will demand that the genome of their children is scanned prenatally, so an abortion can be induced if a child is not "up to standard" (there are already cases in which this is done). Now where will you draw the line? Cancer? Bad Eyes? Tendencies to overweight? Wrong colour of eyes?
...
Now with a very sarcastic view of it all someone might say "Well, the human race needs a healthy dose of darwinism anyway". Well, they may well live among a race of superintelligent, beautiful and healthy people (until a disease sweeps it all away since none of them was resistant to it, there are some arguments in favor of a lare genetic pool), but i prefer that planet to be elsewhere, or if it must be earth then maybe in a hundred years time. Sadly we already had some of it in not too recent past, when a monstrous regime declared part of the population as "unfit for living" and set to work towards a "superior race". Well, i'm happy to live in a world where not everybody is blonde and has blue eyes.
As abortions as consequence of "genetic defects" are already happening the question is, where the line will be drawn, and where it will be shifted after that
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Gattaca
The real fear of this isn't that they can find one or two people with a genetic defect, like many people may believe, but that they are able to find everyone with one. As it turns out, each of us carries, on average, 8 real measurable defects even though we function normally. Insurance companies are going to find out very fast if they start genetic screening (and boy do they want to!) that everyone will be uninsurable and everyone's rates will skyrocket. This won't help anyone, which is why we need privacy laws firmly in place to prevent this sort of massive screening. It's good for some things, but insurance is not one of them.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Now, you could argue that you'd still have the option of going to another company that doesn't perform these tests, but if this sort of thing gains popular acceptance there could potentially be a new form of 'genetic discrimination' taking place all over the world.
And this could extend beyond insurance to things like getting jobs, immigration, marriages... all sorts of things.
Then again, humanity's always looking for a new reason to keep one group or another down, so I guess it's really nothing new.
p.s. Hope this makes sense, it's been a long day, I'm tired and explaining thoughts is difficult...
Gev
So damn witty, they only let me use half.
This is one of the two obvious dilemmas of decoding the Genome, the other is whether a doctor has a right to screen you for, say, Huntington's Disease and then tell you you are going to go incurably mad by the time you hit 40.
The person who opined that it destroys the concept of shared risk is right on. Premiums today are based on not knowing the probability of Alzheimer's or Huntington's or even heart disease. This knowledge skews the statistics in favor of - guess who! - the insurance companies because current rates are based on zero knowledge of a person's prediliction toward these diseases. I don't see them reducing premiums.
Gattaca has been mentioned in half of the posts so far, but that movie comes close to identifying the dangers inherent in detailed knowledge of a person's makeup.
As they say in the article, the insurers are not to be trusted to police themselves, and it is now up to the government to regulate the industry here. But they already screen and presumably deny coverage to Huntington's candidates! So why shouldn't they continue to discriminate against clients?
The net result of all this may be nationalization of health care in England, America, and everywhere. This might be a good thing, as it will free up genetic research without having at least this particular ethical question.
The alternative is to have certain races pay more or less depending on their susceptibility toward a given illness. This, as has been pointed out, is discrimination on a grand scale. Whereas in the past an insurance company couldn't legally say "we can't insure you because you are a Black man", now they can say "we won't insure you because you have the gene for sickle cell anaemia."
By the way, very very soon (according to the book "Genome" - read it!) many of the capabilities revealed in Gattaca will be available. It will prove to be a revelation of "Future Shock" proportions. Bigger than the internet? Hard to say from here. But pretty damn big.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
It is expected that most insurance companies would have some sort of medical exam for things like life insurance, to avoid issues just like this.
But more general items like health insurance are another thing. Or would you like to have YOUR own insurance cancelled because, you are getting older, and might get sick, and thank you for paying out the 30 or 40 years of premiums without much payout.
There has been a major problem with insurances companies cancelling insurance whne you go to use it in a major way.
In this context, avoiding people who might not even know they have some genetic condition can be suspect. The point is not insuring people based on pre-existing conditions is a bad thing. The potential insurance liability should be shared "equally" (or at random) by all insurers.
"Unapproved" tests in this case is not the same as "unapproved" medicine. Medicine is sometimes regulated so that people do not hurt themselves. Tests are sometimes regulated so that the companies do not rip you off.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The question is, ultimately, who should pay the expense of people with genetic diseases?
If the government bans the insurance companies from doing this, the insurance companies will pay out more to these high-risk individuals, and your insurance rates will increase to cover it.
If the government lets the insurance companies operate freely, the government will end up footing the bill through welfare (i.e. your money via taxes).
If it was a libertarian society, the government would not interfere with the insurance companies. Well to-do high-risk people would pay more in insurance, but they would be covered. Poorer high-risk individuals would not be insured, and they would eventually need charity to pay their bills if they succumb to one of these genetic diseases. In such a society, with far fewer taxes, it would be much more common to donate money to charities and community organizations. Your money.
So although I'm generalizing quite a bit, you are paying for genetic diseases no matter which route is taken. It just seems "nicer" to ban the insurance companies from discriminating like this.
I bet the same people up in arms over these genetic tests are the same ones that are fighting anything to do with genetic engineering, genetic science, etc.
Kind of ironic, since we will eventually lessen genetic diseases through genetic engineering, IMO.
-thomas
"And like that
Genetic screening has the potential to become the most effective preventitve healhcare procedure of the new century. If you can identify individuals at risk for a disease, they can be given preventitive medication and can be monitored so that treatment can begin in the earliest stages of the disease. However, if individuals refuse to take part in genetic screening because it can (and as this article shows it will) be used to deny not just insurance benifits, but possibly also to deny access to education, employment, and many other aspects of our daily lives.
World governments need to set clear and fair standards concerning the use of genetic information. First, genetic testing can not be a requirement for anything, especially insurance. Second, every individual should have to give explicit permission for each entity given access to the results of genetic testing. Finally, it should be as illegal to discriminate based on genetic testing as it is to discriminate based on visible genetic attributes such as race. Only then will I volunteer genetic information for the purpose of genetic testing or screening.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
Insurance companies have existed for ages offering coverages for tons of diseases without the ability to genetically screen applicants, and they're not going out of business. They don't need to genetically discriminate. Denying them the ability to do so wouldn't pose a competitive threat to their business model--it would simply preserve the status quo, an environment that they've adapted to and that they prosper in.
Exactly. All of us do. You don't have a one-on-one relationship with an insurer, where they bet that you personally will pay more in premiums than they pay out on your behalf. The risk is spread amongst a large pool of insured people. We all pay premiums, and our payments cover the claims of others. Sooner or later we'll be making our own claim, and others will pay for us. That's the whole point of insurance--to pool financial resources to cover present costs, while providing coverage to everyone who pays for it.
Keep this in mind: nobody is genetically perfect, and nobody is immortal. We all get sick, we all die, and many of us rack up some substantial bills in the process. Some diseases can be tested for genetically, and some can't. Who are you to insist that your premiums be lowered at the expense of others just because the insurance company hasn't figured out what's wrong with you?
I agree. You are one of them.
Insurance cannot protect you from everything bad.
Insurance cannot protect you from anything, despite the claims in some of the advertisements. Insurance (in this case, specifically life insurance) can only protect your dependants from the financial consequences of your (premature) death.
The reason insurance works is that it spreads the risk over as large a number of people as possible. To screen people for the presence of selected traits, over which they have no control, and which may or may not cause premature death, is just plain wrong. If they were screening for all causes of premature death, it might become acceptable, but it is not acceptable to charge you a higher price because you might die of breast cancer, while charging me a lower rate because I won't - despite the fact that I might be more likely to die of something else they're not screening.
You never find questions like "Do you drive a car? If so, how many kilometres per year?" or "Do you make frequent long-distance flights in economy class?"
OK, I admit that they ask if you smoke, or if you participate in dangerous sports. Maybe that's wrong too - but all those potential causes of death are under the control of the insured. If you don't like your premiums being higher, then stop doing it.
--
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
Note: Read the last sentence twice because I know most of you read it wrong the first time. I didn't write if they'd ever failed an AIDS/HIV test. I mean literally, if someone had gone to the doctor worried about HIV, had a test, been given the all clear, and had subsequently tried to apply for life or health coverage, they'd be turned down.
The reasoning behind this logic? Well, anyone who'd be worried about getting AIDS must be living an at-risk lifestyle.
Oh, for the benefit of the usual trolls who post on how this just proves that, once again, the "socialist" UK has a dreadful human rights record, compared to the free market US could I point out that the type of insurance we're talking about here is pretty much a free market in the UK, regulated no more than it is in the US.
What we're seeing here is the usual self-interest run amok that keeps profits up and prices low at the expense of fundamental freedoms. In this case, at least in Britain people will get health insurance from the state, and can seriously embarrass the government, to the point of risking it being toppled in an election, if a government ever decides to refuse health coverage on the grounds of ill health. It's not perfect, but it does, in this case, guarantee privacy and fairness where it matters.
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Keep attacking good things as "communist"
KMSMA (WWBD?)
So my question is: is this actually legal?
... the genetic links just will make the physical/health aspects more precise.
I wouldn't be surprised if it were... insurance
companies already get to discriminate by criteria that practically no one else can: age and gender. Maybe they have race in the closet too.
I just saw Gattaca a few weeks ago for the first time. The phrase that stuck out in my head was "discrimination down to a science". The thing is, the insurance companies -- and who knows who else -- already DO have it down to a science with statistical analysis
And apparently, it's not just coming, it's already here.
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Tweet, tweet.
I think that many people are confused about the purpose of insurance. Insurance cannot protect you from everything bad. It can only protect you from things which nobody can predict. If you can predict it but the insurance company cannot (or is prohibited by law from doing so), then you can exploit the insurance company's ignorance. If this happens often enough, then the insurance company cannot make money, and goes out of business.
Instead, insurance works to buy an unwanted risk from you. In order to price this risk fairly, the insurance company has to understand the risk. If it cannot understand the risk (because it's prohibited from certain actions), then it must charge more for the insurance. Guess who pays this cost? Yep, all insurance customers do.
Ever noticed how seldom politicians are economists? Perhaps that explains their continued enactment of uneconomic laws.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
You are the one who is confused. Applying for medical insurance should not trigger a form of genetic Russian Roulette where you go in for a battery of tests and are faced with financial ruin if one comes up positive. While insurance companies need access to your existing medical records in order to write health and life insurance policies, they should be denied the option of creating new health records with additional testing.
In your world of genetic discrimination, where would you draw the line? Should infants be tested and, if found to have a gene for some devastating illness, be put into an uninsurable genetic underclass -- destined to be financially ruined? Maybe you could carry it further and deny them schooling, Medicare, and social programs (why spend tax dollars on someone who will probably die at a young age?). Perhaps employers could refuse to hire them in order to keep from training someone who will probably die soon. Should family members be forced into bankruptcy in order to pay for the medical care that their genetically-flawed family members need?
We are supposed to be members of a civilization, not pack animals that leave the weak to fend for themselves and die. If you are lucky enough to remain healthy, your insurance premiums should help someone who is not so fortunate. If given the choice of lowering your insurance premiums or of providing medical and life insurance to those less fortunate, I would choose the latter.
At the risk of being redundant, let me attempt to lay out the issue succinctly:
1. If you were to become greviously sick, you most likely could not afford to pay for your health care. The cost to you would be catastrophic.
2. Your insurance company has enough cash that it can afford to pay for you if you get sick. It maintains this state of affairs by setting everyone's premiums so that the company's aggregate expected income is at least 100% of its expected liability. Income above 100% of liability represents the insurer's profits.
3. Given a large enough pool of customers and a comparatively small rate of disease, the company can cover its liability through reasonable (i.e. non-catastrophic) premiums even if it charges everyone the same rate. In this scenario, people with low risk pay higher premiums to subsidize those with high risk. Provided the number of high-risk individuals is small, their extra risk can be spread over the entire customer pool at a minimal cost per person.
4. Alternatively, the insurer can charge higher-risk individuals higher premiums, thereby eliminating the subsidy. Without such subsidies, high-risk individuals may be charged catastrophic premiums and therefore become uninsurable.
Let us assume that the insurer has perfect knowledge of everyone's risk (i.e. the probability that they will get sick). Under what circumstances is it fair(*) to subsidize those with higher risk, rather than making them pay the cost of said risk?
Proposition: "A fair insurer asks its customer pool to subsidize those risks over which the individual has no control, while charging to the individual those risks that she assumes voluntarily." Discuss.
Proposition: "An insurance company seeking to maximize its profit in a competitive setting cannot arbitrarily raise its premiums. It will therefore take every legal measure to lower the aggregate risk of its insured pool. In particular, the company's interests favor denying or charging catastrophic premiums to high-risk individuals, regardless of whether such action is 'fair'(*)."
Discuss.
(*) where "fair" means "consistent with your favorite ethical/moral system."
First, I'll take this post as coming from a Corporate Wag, not a troll.
;)
The second point of view is the insurance company's. How do they know the person applying for coverage isn't terminally ill and will make the company pay out millions of dollars for treatment? The company has a right to know the state of their paitents before giving coverage.
Wake up and smell the espresso, dude, the article is about LIFE Insurance, not Health insurance. Millions of dollars in treatment for a DEAD person? I wouldn't Insure your life - you're smoking crack.
I have no problem with an Insurance company saying "Look, moron, until you quit smoking you're paying an extra $ amount for us to insure your life, cuz you're killing yourself." Smoking and other self-destructive behaviour I can change - my genetic make-up I CANNOT. This is tantamount to the US Government saying "Seeing as this particular group (OK, I'm being P.C. here..) statistically has a tendancy to commit crimes, we'll get the cops to pay special attention to them." Oops, bad example.
You get my drift though - Insurance companies love this type of thing. You pay an Insurance company to assume risk for you - and then they do thier damndest to elimanate that risk. Please realize that an Insurance company takes YOUR money and invests it - that's how they make THIER money. When they pay out, they loose the money to invest, and can't make more profit. So, they make you pay more if you're at greater risk of dying, in order to cover the profit's they're likely to loose by you checking out early. If they had thier way, anyone with a serious illness in their family history would pay DOUBLE for life insurance. Genetic testing would give them an Iron Fist with which to asses the risk of insuring your life - so not only would you be sick, you'd be poor from paying overly inflated life insurance rates because of your genetic makeup. And Lord help you if you're pre-disposed to cancer or something and your employer finds out...
If this were allowed to continue, anyone who could get sick would end up at the fringes of society - "Fuck you if you're going to die at 50, this guy will live to 100 and is a better investment." You'd end up with more discrimination based on genetic makeup, just like the morons who make skin color an issue. After all, that's a genetic trait, isn't it?
Damn. Done ranting. Need Coffee...
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
For a long time, one portion of the population has been paying significantly more for car insurance due to a specific genetic characteristic. That characteristic? A Y chromosome
Where's the difference? You have no more control over your sex than you do the rest of your genome, so how is it permissible to discriminate for car and life insurance on the basis of sex, but not other genetic factors? Just because it takes some fancy testing to determine those factors doesn't change the situation one bit.
Many of the arguments one way or another over this subject miss one point completely:
Free market or no, insurance companies or no -- as long as doctors and hospitals are accessible, people WILL have health care. And the cost WILL be distributed across all levels of health and affluence. It already is.
In the United States, the people will not stand for such actions. If it gets to the point where people even perceive the risk that they might not have health insurance because of being turned down for genetic (or any other reason) - espescially if it is the 'future risk', the public will not stand for it. They will lobby the government, elect officials that promise, and do everything they can to either regulate the industry, or get the goverment to provide health care to every man, woman, and child, reguardless of their condition.
The only reason socialized medicine was fought off in the United States was because the insurance companies weren't doing a bad job, and it's at least a percieved fact that government healthcare would be inferior to private healthcare.
But if a large part of the populace had no access to affordable medical care, simply because they may develop a disease in the future - the Medical community would lose a LOT of business.
If the insurance company won't insure a guy who is a perfectly healthy and PAYING client now, who would normally go in for annual checkups, dental care, immunizations, etc - with his/her children. With genetic screening, the children won't be insured either (having inherited this defect) If this were the case, a very large amount of the populace wouldn't seek health care unless absolutely necessary.
And the medical community loses revenue in a very big way because of the reduced number of patients.
So, you would have two major forces - an even greater proportion of the populace demanding insurance reform, or government health care, and a growing number of health care companies demanding the same.
In the end, everybody WILL have health care. The difference is whether we will have responsible, self-policing insurance companies, heavily regulated and untrusted insurance companies, or the Government.
It is simply not in the insurance companies (or the people's) long-term interest to deny people based on pre-existing conditions of any kind.
Even a pure capitalist would agree it is not just to punish someone based off of conditions that were never a choice of the affected.
Only the already wealthy would try to forge an argument that would make it sound like a Good Thing TM to willfully deny health care to people - not because there is an insufficient amount of care in the area - but because of willfully denying that care because it hurts THEIR already overflowing pocketbook... And then they try to convince as many people as they can that it will take money from everybody else's pocketbook too. It simply isn't the case.
In a modern civilization, the rich will pay for the poor - whether by choice, by tax, or by gunpoint. The rich are always in the minority, and they already have all they need. It's an enevitable consequence of democracy that the voice of the people will outnumber the voice of the rich, and the voice of the people will force the rich to pay to support the poor's needs.
Scoff now - but the concept of public schools, social security, welfare, medicare... all programs that are firmly in place now - these programs would have been scoffed at as ruinous, revolutionary, and completely stoppable by the Vanderbuilts and Rockefellers of a century ago. The rich didn't have their way then, nor will they now.
We won't stand for it, and we'll get our respective governments to intervene before it does.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Maybe they have race in the closet too.
If it becomes legal to discriminate by DNA,
race most certainly WILL be part of the package.
After all, what we call race is just a few broad phenotypes associated with some genotypes.
It's well established that people of certain races are more susceptible to certain ailments. Skin cancer for whites, sickle-cell anemia for some blacks, etc....
--
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
I'm waiting for them to use the records from your Safeway or Jewel/Osco supermarket coupon cards that track what you buy. "No coverage for you, Mr. two pounds of bacon a week! Try granola for a month and we'll talk!"