US Senate Backs Genetic Privacy

An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at NYTimes.com (free registration required), the US Senate has unanimously voted for the first Genetic Privacy Bill. Basically, this would make it illegal for employers and insurers to deny employment or benefits based on genetic analysis of your DNA. While it still needs to be passed by the House, it seems that we're not heading towards a Gattaca-esque society, after all. Hooray for us genetically inferior invalids!"

Comments

wow, what complete stupdity

[dh003i]

Insurance companies asking medical questions violates no-one's privacy. One chooses to or not to have health insurance. Individuals more likely to get various diseases and ailments should pay higher premiums. That's what makes insurance possible and efficient. It's no more reasonable to say that someone who's 80% likely to get alzheimer's based on his or her genome should pay the same premium as someone who isn't, than it is to say that somone who smokes should pay the same premium as someone who doesn't. I suggest you all read The Insurance Scam.

If someone doesn't want to reveal their genetic information to a health insurance company, then they will either have to pay a higher premium by default to cover all of the unexpected risks, or find another company. No-one has the right to get insurance from any particular company at a low rate.

Individuals who think like this obviously have a complete lack of understanding of how insurance works, as well as a complete lack of understanding of economics and praxeology. All that these laws are going to do is force people who are perfectly healthy and likely to be so all their lives to pay higher premiums, to cover for freeloaders much more susceptible to various risks.

The idea of sound insurance is pretty simple. Let's say I'm taking out a term life-insurance policy for the next 10 years. If I'm twice as likely to die in that next 10 years than another person, it makes sense that I pay twice the premium. On the free market, healthy people aren't going to go to insurance companies that charge them higher to allow unhealthy people to freeload.