> who in the future may be able to discriminate against you due to your genetic characteristics.

Look, I know it's fashionable to disavow discrimination in all its forms and for all its reasons, but businesses built on evaluating risk, like insurance companies, NEED to discriminate.

It's impossible to price and discount risk without access to accurate information.

I'd be FAR FAR more worried about governments misusing my genetic data than insurance companies using it to determine an accurate risk profile.

Giving insurance companies more information simply reduces the scope of what they will insure. Highly predictable risk (I will be dead before I turn 150) is not really insurable. Unpredictable risk (I will be struck by lightning) is. Genetic screening just moves some unpredictables to the predictable column.

Is it fair? No clue. If it turns out that there's a genetic predisposition to being struck by lightning that modern genetic testing uncovers, then all those "struck by lightning" policies will die - they were subsidizing the highly conductive to the detriment of the non-conductive. Hope you're not highly conductive!

The insurance company can price risk at the population level, there is no need for it to be able to price it individually.

This can be "less fair" to the lower risk members of the population, but the other side of that is whether the insurance company is actually capable of doing the individual pricing in a fair way, or if it is just being presumptuous.

The problem is adverse selection. If insurance buyers have information that insurance sellers aren't allowed to have or act on, high risk people will buy, while low-risk people won't. As losses go up, so will the price and when the price goes so high that only the highest risk people will buy, the market will collapse.

TIL using statistical data to make actuarial data more accurate (e.g., insurance) is discrimination.

Yup.

"Oh, you're of African background and have sickle-cell anemia. Your sore throat isn't covered as your spleen dysfunction is a preexisting condition."

If insurance companies are able to take advantage of genetic information, won't they just pay people to gather it?

Like, for $500 someone could follow you around for several days waiting for the 1 lapse where you leak a little DNA into the public environment.

Or you know, they will just discriminate against people that refuse to share their DNA. The narrow wedge where they are forbidden from requiring DNA but free to discriminate based upon it is still a pretty fucked up world.

It's not really plausible that they would hire people to secretly gather it from you. Maybe they just make it a requirement for getting the insurance at all, that seems cleaner and more scalable.

I dunno, I think it's pretty trivial to back into life expectancy and genetic risk factors from publicly available ancestry information combined with death certificates. We have ~200 years of pretty good records here in the US and many more if you go into Europe's records. From that data you can get a really good idea of longevity for a given person.

Ancestry.com even has a public tool for doing this at a high level: https://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=trujillo

Seems the cats been out of the bag for a long time.

Maybe you shouldn't throw around 'dumb' quite so liberally.

They're already discriminating. It's a large part of their job. I much rather they do it accurately than inaccurately.