So I've come to the conclusion that the US model of private health care is ultimately doomed and nothing will save it. Of course it's going to kill people in th

So I've come to the conclusion that the US model of private health care is ultimately doomed and nothing will save it. Of course it's going to kill people in the meantime but it is doomed. While on vacation recently I ended up listening to the Bear Brooks podcast [1]. It's a little longwinded at times (but it is aimed at non-technical people) but is not a bad way to spend a long drive. The interesting thing about this story is how advancements in DNA testing have taken us from the simple case of is or is not a match (used in paternity testing and for forensics) to figuring out how much of a match you are. This has created a new field of genetic genealogy that famously led to the identification of the Golden State Killer [2]. So there's a lot of talk about privacy and your DNA but much like having your contact information uploaded by someone else, this is showing that that will be insufficient as your DNA will ultimately be inferred (at least in probability terms) by people who aren't you. There's really no putting this genie back in the bottle. So take a disease like Cystic Fibrosis. Currently this requires life long medication and care. Depending on the severity, you may require one (or more) lung transplants. All of this is expensive. So if you have CF and want to get private insurance in the US this may well be a pre-existing condition and excluded. Now this disease is usually quite apparent from birth but there are other diseases that are not (eg Huntington's). If you'd had a test and know you have it the insurance company has a "right" to know it (if you accept the premise of the US health insurance system, which I, of course, do not). But this is only going to get worse. Ultimately health insurers will able to figure out if you're much more likely to have certain expensive conditions by knowing, say, that a sibling is a carrier (which greatly increases the chances you have it). Taken to its natural conclusion, the system of private health insurance cannot survive. The only workable solution is group health insurance. Sufficiently large groups statistically even out. That's how insurance is meant to work. This could be a fully public health system or something in between (eg state-level). So back to the medical credit score. There will be fights over this. At some point you'll have a right to see it and get corrections. This will probably be championed by states since the Federal government seems to have forfeited, well, governing. But all this is just arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Of course there's still the separate issue of costs (in the US) to deal with but one step at a time. [1]: https://www.bearbrookpodcast.com/ https://www.bearbrookpodcast.com/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_State_Killer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_State_Killer