What’s wrong with a life insurance company getting a more accurate probability of me dying from some rare disease? Maybe my rates should be raised if there’s a higher risk of me kicking the bucket. This works both ways too - my DNA can reveal that I will likely live a long premium-paying life. Insurance companies make money by being accurate, not by under or overestimating the risks. If DNA helps them be more accurate, good, maybe you can receive some of that value from improved efficiency.
Well, shucks, why not apply the exact same argument to health insurance as well? Or even auto insurance?
While adverse selection is undeniably a tricky problem, the underlying raison d'etre is pooled risk, to help individuals and families mitigate catastrophic losses. Maybe you're all right with the prospect of future analyses condemning to uninsurability folks with rare combinations of alleles that turn out to be strongly deleterious. To me, this seems like breaking the regulated semi-statis between insurers and insureds, and like breaking the social contract more generally.
If you are referring to the situation in the United States, where health care is managed mostly by private health insurance, it is already a terrible social contract.
The whole system is going to have to adapt to more information on individuals being available.
Perhaps the insurance company will not give you an insurance at all if you are deemed a high enough genetic risk. Perhaps, while the main disease works its way, you will not be covered for the side effects (like pneumonia) either, as you have no insurance.
This might or might not be an issue now (regardless of the place of residence), but laws can always be changed. And societies can always develop to be more totalitarist, even up to extremes, and it is not like the collected data just vanishes when things start to slide. (Case in point: IBM's Hollerith machines and population records)
I was very curious about 23andme and really wanted to try it. After some due diligence I concluded it is not worth it because of privacy and other implications going forward. It is not what they do today, since they don't hide the obvious sharing and datamining, so if one joins them it is through informed consent. My concern was rather what kind of systems and policies they enable eventually in the future, after the information gets sold/shared enough times to anyone who can pay enough. At this point there is no control anymore in how (and by whom) the data gets used.
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