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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."
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!"