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>My DNA isn't some terrible secret I have to hide in the dark. .....please get back to us on how that opinion ages once your insurance companies get ahold of t

• zo1 3y ago
  Not OP, and I agree that research needs to get access to DNA for medicinal, personalization and drug-development research purposes. What I'm more worried about is this sort of data being used to train a neural network that maps genes to physical traits, which would be both a goldmine and Pandora's box. If I could compare it to something recent, it's the whole Content -> LLM -> Content loop that was created and we're all upset over now to various degrees. Our DNA is the content and up until now has been an opaque black-box with only minor views into it for very specific genetic diseases. Once they open up the box that allows them to get to things like IQ, height, muscle-density, resistance to diseases, fertility, etc, then the human race is in for a wild down-hill ride.
• xnorswap 3y ago
  Once that happens, it won't be by the backdoor. 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. People love a "discount".
  • trimethylpurine 3y ago
    In the US at least, according to some quick web searching, discounts must apply to the entire pool of insured. (For medical insurance specifically.)
  • sergers 3y ago
    My household mortgage provider, TD Bank Canada, offered me critical illness/death "insurance" for me and my spouse. As we were insuring over a million in the mortgage/loc, I guess they have diff requirements. They sent over their own funded nurse, who collected vitals and blood samples which we signed off them running any number of tests. I should have checked if any clause for DNA. But that's not needed... Insurance is already all over you now. Mostly in past was just a quick questionnaire. Then I was use to be sent to Dr for physical. Now they contracting their own nurses and labs. They probably already collecting your dna
  • panta 3y ago
    taken to the extreme, if complete data availability allowed to predict the future with enough precision, then everyone would pay an insurance premium corresponding to their insured negative events. In practice insurances wouldn't have any reason to exist. The foundational premise of the insurance concept is that risk is spread across every participant in an equal manner.
    • clbrmbr 3y ago
      Really important comment! Is having a bad recessive a “pre-existing condition”? Or do genotypes form already legally protected classes? Clearly we need good lawyers here, or careful regulation, or public medical insurance. I hope it doesn’t go the way of car insurance.
      • 0x00_NULL 3y ago
        While this is an interesting idea, no doubt, epigenetics casts major doubt on whether knowing the DNA expression at a particular time is diagnostically useful. Sure. There are some conditions that are purely genetic, but many genes can be switched on and off depending on the environment - or even recoded in the replication process. DNA isn’t as static as we once thought and knowing a person’s DNA is not quite as useful as we imagined. This isn’t as big of a deal as we imagined. It’s going to take some incredible processing to uncover causal patterns, and a huge amount of experimentation to determine whether they are stable against epigenetic changes. In my opinion, this is quite exciting.
    • WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
      > The foundational premise of the insurance concept is that risk is spread across every participant in an equal manner. Applying this broad principle to auto insurance, it isn't doing well. Auto ins is ~mandated. Participants are forced to pay for risk pools they aren't part of. ex: Car repair costs are skyrocketing. Premiums are also skyrocketing, including for people who don't carry collision.
      • plonk 3y ago
  • Ancalagon 3y ago
    Man that is so dystopian, and I don't disagree with what you're saying will happen at all.
• globular-toast 3y ago
  I worked in insurance and they all seem intent on tailoring everyone's insurance policies based on any minutiae they can dig up on them. For example they found out for life insurance that people who live in greener areas live longer, so they were trying to obtain geographical data for "greenness". I asked them what the end game is. What happens when everyone's insurance policy is exactly tailored to them? What is the point of insurance then? If they get it too right they put themselves out of business. They didn't have a good answer.
  • charcircuit 3y ago
    >What is the point of insurance then? Protection from unlikely events. >If they get it too right they put themselves out of business. No, they don't. Getting it too right just means they are able to more effectively compete on pricing since they know the lowest price they can offer while still making profit.
    • sa-code 3y ago
      The point you missed is that when insurance is hyper tailored to specific people, you are basically paying for your own healthcare and can cut out the middle man
      • bossyTeacher 3y ago
        insurance <> healthcare the point of insurance is to cover for unlikely events not expected events (like you needing increase healthcare support as you age)
      • charcircuit 3y ago
        That is assuming all health related costs can be predicted 100% correctly. If there is a 1/3rd chance to incur a cost then insurance lets you get away with only paying 1/3rd of the cost.
        • adastra22 3y ago
• adastra22 3y ago
  That was explicitly made illegal under federal law for exactly this reason.
• solumunus 3y ago
  More efficiently priced insurance would be a good thing. A lot of people seem to be confused about what insurance is.
  • denton-scratch 3y ago
    "Efficiently priced insurance": do you mean so the insurance company can set your premiums based on a more-accurate estimate of your risks? The whole point of insurance is (or was) pooled risk. The more the insurance company knows about my risk (even risks I don't know about), the less point there is in me buying insurance; I may as well just put my premiums into a private sinking fund.
    • SantalBlush 3y ago
      Exactly. If an insurance company has perfect knowledge of each individual's risk and charges accordingly, it ceases to be insurance.
      • solumunus 3y ago
        So even if your insurance worked out cheaper you would now see it as not worth buying because it’s too accurately priced? Literally what are any of you talking about, this is crazy talk. You buy insurance to hedge against risk, that’s it, if the cost accurately represents the risk then that’s a good thing. If you have unlimited money then it’s always financially better to not buy insurance, that’s correct right now… People don’t have unlimited money to spend on massive, unexpected acute financial obligations, that’s why people buy insurance… ITT: people not even understanding why they’re spending money on insurance every month, this is mind blowing to me.
• adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  People in the UK should take note of this thread: this is what the private health industry dearly, dearly wants for you too. Treasure what you have while you still have it.
  • dkural 3y ago
    UK has done the largest sequencing project on Earth, the UK BioBank, and shares the data with both academia and private companies to do drug discovery. NHS is also chronically underfunded.
    • adhesive_wombat 3y ago
      But as no one (yet) needs private health insurance, and very few people have it, it is not (yet) a societal worry that the data will be used to "offer a choice" to people based on genetic misfortune (the choice is bankruptcy or death). > NHS is also chronically underfunded. That's very much by ideological design. A recent ex-health minister even co-wrote a book which contained this: > Our ambition should be to break down the barriers between private & public provision, in effect denationalising the provision of health care in Britain. Notably he became health minister after this, not before, so the appointment says a lot about what the Party has in mind. If you look at the graph of waiting times, his tenure is from 2012-2018, and the party is in place from 2010 and quickly has the knives out to ruin the then-recent improvement. https://www.statista.com/chart/27447/nhs-hospital-waiting-times/ https://www.statista.com/chart/27447/nhs-hospital-waiting-ti... The latest squeeze on "efficiency" (dragging this back into technology) is throwing AI (read: more consultancy contracts) at it.
• luma 3y ago
  This sort of thing has been illegal in the US since 2008. You’re talking hypotheticals that have already been addressed by legislation.
  • varjag 3y ago
    Man were the old times amazing. Mandatory seatbelts, smoking bans and this. Things that would be impossible to legislate in 2020s.
  • salawat 3y ago
    Note: Compliance departments in insurance companies are basically intended to facilitate by rote presentations of trainings to check off that list item as a required business operation. Actual teeth to bite back or remidiate non-compliant activity of a company that the executives have decided to file under the "fuck it, nobody's looking" risk heading are basically not there. Point being, just because the law is on the books doesn't mean it isn't being elided at every opportunity. You have been warned.
  • Arainach 3y ago
    I have not done extensive research, but I suspect this is as effective as banning the government from data collection, with the result that the government pays companies to do that and it's somehow legal that way.
• delfinom 3y ago
  The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) of 2008 already forbids them from doing anything. >GINA prohibits health insurers from discrimination based on the genetic information of enrollees. Specifically, health insurers may not use genetic information to determine if someone is eligible for insurance or to make coverage, underwriting or premium-setting decisions.
• solardev 3y ago
  The American insurance model is stupid and needs to go away, regardless of my DNA.