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It is not just privacy...how about human rights? "Sorry sir your infant child is not eligible for that heart operation due to the genetic marker we discovered

by mrtron 14y ago

It is not just privacy...how about human rights? "Sorry sir your infant child is not eligible for that heart operation due to the genetic marker we discovered in your profile."

mhb 14y ago
It's not just privacy or human rights; it's an apparently pervasive misconception about what insurance is. The premise of insurance is that you are insuring against the unknown. If you know that something is the matter with you, then it's no longer insurance. It's getting someone to pay for a treatment that you know you will need. Whether other people should be paying for that is another discussion.
- jerf 14y ago
  While I think it is important for people to understand the difference between health insurance and a health care plan, there's no actual problem with people banding together and creating health care plans that are no longer, strictly speaking, insurance. I do think a nontrivial amount of the mess in the health care system is the confusion between the two. People want to create health care plans, but they are trying to make it out of insurance companies, which is going to be problematic at best. Further, people want health care plans but don't want to think about it from an actuarial perspective... because they don't like the answers that come out. That doesn't prevent the answer from coming out, but it does mean we end up trying to build glorious systems that seal themselves away from reality from the get go, and that also can only be problematic at best, total failures at worst.
  - mhb 14y ago
    I think that the more certainty people have about their future medical issues the less likely health care plan groups are to work. What incentive does a future-healthy person have to join with someone who is certain to have high expenses? And why would you trust someone to tell you that they haven't been tested and know what lies ahead?
    - jerf 14y ago
      That's what I'm getting at. The more knowledge all the participants have (and that's both insurance and users), the more the fundamental contradictions between "insurance" and "health care plans" emerge. But closing your eyes and just remaining ignorant is a terrible choice too, because in the medical domain, knowledge isn't just power, it's life.
tptacek 14y ago
That's not how insurance works now; if you already have insurance for your family, they don't render family members ineligible for therapy based on evidence of predisposition to illness. And as of 2014, regardless of the nature of the evidence, insurance companies will no longer be allowed to exclude customers based on predisposition to illness or preexisting conditions.
danielweber 14y ago
Already illegal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrimination_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrimi... In fact, HIPAA might have already forbidden that. The law wasn't clear but it's entirely moot now.

by mrtron 14y ago

It is not just privacy...how about human rights? "Sorry sir your infant child is not eligible for that heart operation due to the genetic marker we discovered in your profile."

mhb 14y ago

It's not just privacy or human rights; it's an apparently pervasive misconception about what insurance is. The premise of insurance is that you are insuring against the unknown. If you know that something is the matter with you, then it's no longer insurance. It's getting someone to pay for a treatment that you know you will need. Whether other people should be paying for that is another discussion.

jerf 14y ago
While I think it is important for people to understand the difference between health insurance and a health care plan, there's no actual problem with people banding together and creating health care plans that are no longer, strictly speaking, insurance. I do think a nontrivial amount of the mess in the health care system is the confusion between the two. People want to create health care plans, but they are trying to make it out of insurance companies, which is going to be problematic at best. Further, people want health care plans but don't want to think about it from an actuarial perspective... because they don't like the answers that come out. That doesn't prevent the answer from coming out, but it does mean we end up trying to build glorious systems that seal themselves away from reality from the get go, and that also can only be problematic at best, total failures at worst.
- mhb 14y ago
  I think that the more certainty people have about their future medical issues the less likely health care plan groups are to work. What incentive does a future-healthy person have to join with someone who is certain to have high expenses? And why would you trust someone to tell you that they haven't been tested and know what lies ahead?
  - jerf 14y ago
    That's what I'm getting at. The more knowledge all the participants have (and that's both insurance and users), the more the fundamental contradictions between "insurance" and "health care plans" emerge. But closing your eyes and just remaining ignorant is a terrible choice too, because in the medical domain, knowledge isn't just power, it's life.

tptacek 14y ago

That's not how insurance works now; if you already have insurance for your family, they don't render family members ineligible for therapy based on evidence of predisposition to illness. And as of 2014, regardless of the nature of the evidence, insurance companies will no longer be allowed to exclude customers based on predisposition to illness or preexisting conditions.

danielweber 14y ago

Already illegal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrimination_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrimi... In fact, HIPAA might have already forbidden that. The law wasn't clear but it's entirely moot now.