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Bill To Outlaw Genetic Discrimination In US
fatduck sends us a brief note from New Scientist about the overwhelming passage in the US House of Representatives of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. As written, the bill would prohibit insurance companies from charging higher rates, and employers from discriminating in hiring, based on the results of genetic tests. A Boston Globe editorial notes that the bill has been held up in the Senate by the action of a single senator, who has an (outdated) objection based on his anti-abortion stance. President Bush has said he will sign the bill if it reaches his desk.
Once the genome is completely mapped, and every congenital defect is detectable, the life insurance industry will change completely. Even if they're not allowed to check, or base their rates on the results, you can bet insurance companies will take a quick look at what they can expect over the life of the policyholder. If I have a heart condition or a neurological defect that's going to kill me sometime between 55-70, that can really give the actuaries something to chew on. While not 100% certain of when I'll die, they know when I'm most likely to die, and the rest is all accident insurance.
A lot of auto insurance customers are up in arms about the "insurance score" that most US auto insurers use to determine part of your premiums. For those who don't know, the insurer runs a credit report to see how responsible you are with your finances. I guess the idea is that someone who doesn't pay their bills on time is most likely to commit fraud or be absent-minded and get into more accidents. Basing part of your life insurance premiums on a known portion of your long-term health history seems fairer to me than this.
I hope we do wind up with most of the genetic puzzle solved sometime in my life. We could wipe out most inherited conditions in 2 or 3 generations. A lot of people think it's too much like engineering a society, but I think it would be a great service to the species. There should be some limits, but who wouldn't want to get rid of conditions that produce people who are a burden on society? (retards, etc.)
This is exactly the case for nationalized health care. Insurance companies are about mitigating risk. Once you've tested positive (at least for some conditions), you're no longer a risk. A rational insurance company would then set your rates at the cost of treatment.
However, as a society, we expect to have a certain incidence of these genetic disorders. It's unfair to expect the individual to pay for it -- they did nothing wrong, they shouldn't be punished. We as a society either need to decide that we don't care to help these people, tough luck for them, or we need to decide that we look out for our own and pay for the health care for these sorts of disorders.
Alternatively, we could come up with some plan that said that whoever your insurance company is when you have the test, they're on the hook for all future related bills -- but that's really just the same thing as society paying for it, we've just migrated the cost from a tax into insurance premiums, and it seems to me that hiding it that way is a bad thing.
As someone who is relatively healthy, I'd really rather not call paying for people with genetic conditions 'insurance', as it isn't.
You are a fool. You have no idea how your gene expression will change as you get older, and until you've been genotyped you have no idea what chronic diseases are in store for you.
I'm fine with society at large stepping in and covering/mitigating their medical problems(because we are wealthy beyond imagination), but the idea that they can buy insurance against a condition after it is known is simply wrong. It's cost sharing with no risk component at all.
In other words, we should use our insurance system to incentivize people to have fewer genetic defects!
We can start by allowing insurance companies to surcharge black people for sickle-cell anemia. It isn't fair that white people should have to pay for a disease they don't even get. It's cost sharing with no risk component at all.
Too many people look at insurnace as a charity, and that everyone should be entitled somehow to cheap insurance. That's not what it is. There are two reasons to take out insurance. (1) if you believe the odds of cashing in on policy x the value of the policy exceeds the cost of the loss x the chance of the loss, or (2) if the harm caused by the event uninsured is unacceptable regardless of the low odds of it occurring. We take out auto insurance for the second reason, not because we believe we are going to run into someone, but because they could sue us for $2M and that would financially ruin us. The insurance companies carefully calculate the odds for the first situation, and you can bet every penny that they have determined that statistically they will come out ahead. This is how they determine the cost of policies, and this is why they need as much information on the details of the insured before they can come up with a policy cost. Buying insurance for this reason is like gambling... the house always wins. The margin may be low, but they DO always win in the end.
If you go into a policy with a "prior condition" that changes the odds dramatically, and they have to adjust the cost of your policy accordingly to keep in the black on the average. This is not unexpected and not unfair. If they are fairly sure they are going to have to pay out on you, your rates are higher because on the average, your payout will be higher than their average customer. The rest of their customers do not want to have to pay for your increased risk
Of course with unknown preexisting conditions like say, a congenitcal heart defect, they won't win that bet, but they can't know. So they raise *everyone's* rates a hair to make up for the unknown.
What these ppl here want to do is to take what should be a higher policy rate for them, and dump it onto all the rest of us, a little bit for everyone. That's NOT how it's supposed to work, and I really don't feel like helping you to pay for your insurance policy.
IMHO, insurance companies should be allowed to conduct any test they want on you. Companies with more tests or more invasitve tests will get less customers so free market will keep the abuses in check. If you don't want to submit to tests, you will probably have to get a different, more expensive policy, and that is to be expected. Though if you pass their tests you get a lower rate than you would have otherwise. Fail the tests and owell, high rates. Quit crying, it's not their fault, that's how life works. Go blame god or something, don't hike MY rates.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.