Insurance companies could directly ask for DNA if they don't care about legality. And in return they could easily offer say 90% discount to 90% of the people.
It could work the other way to: new analysis on your DNA could reduce your premiums. As such, I don't think it's unreasonable for some people to want to submit their DNA.
No. The US Congress already passed a Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act in 2008 that makes it illegal for insurance companies to do this. They won't take your genetic data even if you offer it to them.
It still certainly seems like it would limit your exposure to practical consequences. If a health insurance company decides to use DNA databases when calculating premiums, it would certainly be more difficult to use your DNA data if your identity is merely inferred by genetic analysis rather than voluntarily self-implicating yourself.
At least the health insurance industry is legally prohibited from charging different rates to people based on DNA. So, at most, they can use it to try to get you specialized care.
All I am saying is insurance companies could ask and people will happily give their DNA for say 90% discount(which I think they could easily provide). They don't need family members or any other things or any other backdoor.
In the US GINA bans health insurance companies from using genetic data for determining premiums or eligibility.
If it were legal you wouldn't have to worry about insurance companies mining genetic databases, it wouldn't matter, they'd simply demand a DNA sample in order to be insured.
It's been illegal for insurance to use your DNA to discriminate against you or charge different costs since 2008 (see the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act).
If that changes I'll regret having used 23andme, but so far I'm not worried.
If insurance companies are able to take advantage of genetic information, won't they just pay people to gather it?
Like, for $500 someone could follow you around for several days waiting for the 1 lapse where you leak a little DNA into the public environment.
Or you know, they will just discriminate against people that refuse to share their DNA. The narrow wedge where they are forbidden from requiring DNA but free to discriminate based upon it is still a pretty fucked up world.
Yeah, this. If an entity really wants to screen your DNA, there are easier routes than figuring out how to deanonymise you from a collection of thousands of profiles with basic demographic info they've just bought or paying enough to convince the entity with the very profitable lawful line in selling anonymised data to break the law for them.
Insurance companies will offer a "DNA discount" and ask for DNA directly, and simply charge more to anyone who refuses, and then grade the amount of "discount" based on the risk profile back from the DNA sample.
If you hold out and refuse, you'll simply get lumped in with the riskiest.
I mention the insurance risk in my post. Yes, I do think insurance companies will try to use this data. I don't see how to avoid it though. It seems to me that it is inevitable that they will get my DNA at some point. That said, I buy insurance for the unknown risks. If I had a known condition, I would expect that to be factored into the price.
They also take into account smoking. Playing devil's advocate if a car insurance company can charge you a higher premium because you are male why shouldn't a life insurance company use your genetic code?
I think insurance companies aren't above doing anything illegal, especially if it can not insure you/drive you away with a high quote if it saves them many years and millions and millions of dollars covering someone's care for Huntington's or chemo for breast cancer or some other terrible disease for which someone is genetically predisposed.
The punishment for violations of the Genetic Information NonDiscrimination Act can be up to a million dollars in fines and some jail time. It is exceedingly rare for corporate officers to go to jail for acts of corporations, so likely violations would simply be fines. Cancer is expensive to cover (less so for insurance companies working with hospitals, much more for you and I), and the fines are relatively small, with the chance of jail time exceedingly small. I am unaware of anyone who has been prosecuted under this Act at all. I did a cursory search and didn't see anything.
The forgoing leads me to believe that like many crimes that have low rates of prosecution and relatively small fines, it would probably make sense for a corporate board (or series of employees acting under mutual light peer pressure) to use DNA information as an input into their actuarial tables.
Additionally, it would be difficult to spot clusters of people who are otherwise healthy with high insurance quotes. Even if you had the actual insurance quotes, getting peoples' medical information, especially in bulk, is extremely difficult because the aggregators of such information are typically bound by HIPAA.
All that to say, I think this is an extremely reasonable concerned and I would be shocked if companies didn't already use DNA information in some form, even if that form is as some input to a machine learning model, but I'll demurr on that subject because I know little about it.
reply