On Fri, 24 May 1996, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote:
In regards to accepting the risk themselves, look at what happens when you have insurance companies that are required to accept everyone at an equal price. The ones who have information - denied to the insurance company - that they're going to get sick will sign up more than the ones who won't. Take Huntington's as an example. If genetic screening is prohibited to insurance companies, someone who has a test and finds out that they've got the allele for Huntington's, and thus will get sick and die from it, is going to go down and get themselves insurance. Then the insurance - e.g., everyone else who buys from that insurance company - will have to pay for them when they need several years of nursing care before dying. How is this fair to everyone else, including the insurance company?
I'm sure you know the law and practice better, but my insurance seems to have a "preexisting conditions" clause. Knowingly doing the above constitutes fraud. (Of course lots of people probably get away with it.) Moreover, when the insurance company pays out, that ultimately comes out of premiums. I don't have Huntington's, but I don't mind paying an extra $X into a risk pool for people with Huntington's because it means I don't have to submit to genetic screening, either. You don't have to have something to hide to see it as an invasion of privacy. It's a pool of consumers establishing preferences, not just individual consumers v. producers. The meaning of microeconomics changes as it scales.
You spoke of fairness. Capitalism isn't fair; neither is life. Someone who is bigger physically will have to spend more on food to keep alive than someone who is small. Does that argue for socialization of food, so that
[Yawn] By "fairness" I meant that equal risks should be treated equally. Cost of disease A = cost of disease B. The detection of predisposition to disease A is politically feasible, but the same isn't true for disease B. I'd say you were discriminating against people predisposed to disease A, because they're paying into the risk pool for B, but B isn't paying into the risk pool for A. -rich