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> The example you gave about health insurance is implausible [...] See [1]. From [1]: > GINA focuses only on one line of insurance—health; it does not prohib

> The example you gave about health insurance is implausible [...] See [1]. From [1]: > GINA focuses only on one line of insurance—health; it does not prohibit other insurances—life , disability, long-term care (LTC), auto, or property—from using genetic information [...] in 2020, [...] Florida became the first US state to prohibit life, LTC, and disability insurers from using genetic test results to set premiums or to cancel, limit, or deny coverage To me that means you are not safe. > and there's something bad in it This is just gambling. If enough peoples' DNA is out there, you will see the whole-population rate for conditions. You might consider it OK to be unexpectedly unable to buy long-term disability insurance because you have a 50x greater risk for YYYY than the general population. > [...] and I for some reason won’t have a job that gives me health insurance anyway This is an extremely privileged attitude. This part seems to me that if you get very ill you *must* continue to work in order to maintain your coverage. Even a highly paid SWE can be laid low by carpal tunnel syndrome. [1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9165621/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9165621/

shiroiushi 2y ago
While the stuff about disability and LTC insurance is slightly concerning, the part about life insurance isn't. I've never seen any convincing evidence that life insurance is anything but a big scam. The only time it seems to make any sense if if you're pretty sure you're going to die very soon, and take out a term life insurance, but this seems to require either the ability to see the future, or a plan to hire someone to kill you so your family gets the insurance money. Why auto or property insurance would be affected by your DNA I can't even begin to imagine.
- lazide 2y ago
  Term life insurance is not a scam if you have dependents. It’s offloading the potentially severe consequences to someone else if you’re the primary wage earner and die, during a defined period of time. And it’s generally inexpensive. Think ‘normally I’d be working for another 20 years, would buy a house, send kids to college, etc. but I just got diagnosed with terminal cancer and now my kids are totally screwed.’. Whole life insurance is a scam.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
    << Whole life insurance is a scam. I think I know where you are going with this, but could you elaborate? Is the objection here based on math ( whole is life is more expensive than term so it is not cost-effective? -- because otherwise you are simply paying premium for another benefit ) or something else?
    - lazide 2y ago
      It is term life + an annuity in disguise, with worse returns. That is also why it is the dominant product that life insurance sales folks try to sell. Because term life is well regulated and understood, so not high margin. They generally get really disappointed when you buy a standard term life policy, but they’ll still sell it to you because money is money.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Do you have a disposition making you more likely to end up in an auto accident? Can some other correlation be done which is not genetic per se but works out to some higher risk social stratum in aggregate? You never know. The power imbalance is great, they won't tell you why you got your score and with enough machine learning they probably can't even if they wanted.
nonameiguess 2y ago
This stuff still seems frankly theoretical. I finally opted into long-term disability insurance after using the maximum short-term twice in the span of two years because of spinal degeneration in my late 30s. You have to agree to a medical exam and send records to apply for this insurance anyway, and in spite of trying to get it specifically because I'd used up the max short-term, and I am seemingly quite a high risk to actually become disabled, I was still approved. In practice, in talking to co-workers also applying for the same things, the only people who ever got denied were all obese. This is all setting aside that, assuming somewhat symmetric distributions of genetically determined traits, half of all people will have above average genetics. The conversation on the Internet always seems to fixate on people being denied coverage or charged more, but that seems to assume pricing models are just plain malicious, in which case they could charge more and deny you anyway, with or without data. Assuming they're actually using the data and building real predictive models, half the population would benefit from insurance companies having more data. All that said, I would still never submit data to a company like 23andme, and would also never allow the police to have camera feeds of my house, even though I'm extremely confident they would never find a reason to arrest me. It's creepy, feels invasive, and I just don't want it.

shiroiushi 2y ago

While the stuff about disability and LTC insurance is slightly concerning, the part about life insurance isn't. I've never seen any convincing evidence that life insurance is anything but a big scam. The only time it seems to make any sense if if you're pretty sure you're going to die very soon, and take out a term life insurance, but this seems to require either the ability to see the future, or a plan to hire someone to kill you so your family gets the insurance money. Why auto or property insurance would be affected by your DNA I can't even begin to imagine.

lazide 2y ago
Term life insurance is not a scam if you have dependents. It’s offloading the potentially severe consequences to someone else if you’re the primary wage earner and die, during a defined period of time. And it’s generally inexpensive. Think ‘normally I’d be working for another 20 years, would buy a house, send kids to college, etc. but I just got diagnosed with terminal cancer and now my kids are totally screwed.’. Whole life insurance is a scam.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
  << Whole life insurance is a scam. I think I know where you are going with this, but could you elaborate? Is the objection here based on math ( whole is life is more expensive than term so it is not cost-effective? -- because otherwise you are simply paying premium for another benefit ) or something else?
  - lazide 2y ago
    It is term life + an annuity in disguise, with worse returns. That is also why it is the dominant product that life insurance sales folks try to sell. Because term life is well regulated and understood, so not high margin. They generally get really disappointed when you buy a standard term life policy, but they’ll still sell it to you because money is money.
actionfromafar 2y ago
Do you have a disposition making you more likely to end up in an auto accident? Can some other correlation be done which is not genetic per se but works out to some higher risk social stratum in aggregate? You never know. The power imbalance is great, they won't tell you why you got your score and with enough machine learning they probably can't even if they wanted.

nonameiguess 2y ago

This stuff still seems frankly theoretical. I finally opted into long-term disability insurance after using the maximum short-term twice in the span of two years because of spinal degeneration in my late 30s. You have to agree to a medical exam and send records to apply for this insurance anyway, and in spite of trying to get it specifically because I'd used up the max short-term, and I am seemingly quite a high risk to actually become disabled, I was still approved. In practice, in talking to co-workers also applying for the same things, the only people who ever got denied were all obese. This is all setting aside that, assuming somewhat symmetric distributions of genetically determined traits, half of all people will have above average genetics. The conversation on the Internet always seems to fixate on people being denied coverage or charged more, but that seems to assume pricing models are just plain malicious, in which case they could charge more and deny you anyway, with or without data. Assuming they're actually using the data and building real predictive models, half the population would benefit from insurance companies having more data. All that said, I would still never submit data to a company like 23andme, and would also never allow the police to have camera feeds of my house, even though I'm extremely confident they would never find a reason to arrest me. It's creepy, feels invasive, and I just don't want it.