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Re:Florida becomes first state to enact DNA privacy law, blo... by toomuchtodo on Sunday July 05, 2020 @05:31PM (#23742218)
Life, disability, and long term care are not the same as health insurance (which shouldn’t be insurance! It should be universal healthcare).

You insure against risk, you pay for care, just as you pay for gas in your car and oil changes, but your insurance covers accidents (which goes so far as to charge people of different genders and ages differently because of the risk demonstrated by the data). Should I be offended that my auto insurance charged me a crazy high premium for driving a high performance sports car at 18 years old as a single male? No! I was a high risk based on the data (which distilled down to my own risk management as then owner of an 18 year old male brain). And if the data (even genetic data) shows someone to be higher risk for an insurance product (again, we’re not talking health insurance or healthcare), they should be exposed to that cost.

Life isn’t fair, and this is a poor attempt at tilting the scales if your goal is to make it more fair (considering the size of your risk pools at typical private insurers offering these products). It’s an unfunded mandate.

Re:Florida becomes first state to enact DNA privacy law, blo... by perl4ever on Sunday July 05, 2020 @11:48PM (#23744510)
Your views, while very common, or at least commonly expressed, really bother me because of what seems to me like an obvious reductio ad absurdam.

You can always take any existing regime of discrimination and make it more fine grained, but at some point that has to stop or there is no insurance. If discrimination has to stop somewhere, then there's no principled reason why the discrimination you like is necessary, or natural. Even apart from the existence of protected classes in society.

If an insurance company can discriminate arbitrarily, why not do it in real time? Your car could have a monitor that would tell if you are tired or drunk. Would it make sense to allow them to charge you extra minute by minute? The ultimate would be to have the decelerometer that sets off your airbag signal the insurance company, and charge you based on the projected average repair cost before you come to a stop.

Sometimes people say car insurance is like health insurance and sometimes they say it's not, but both have extensive regulation that prevents the insurance company from maximizing returns, because insurance is extremely susceptible to devolving into taking in money and paying 0% out. It seems fundamentally wrong headed to me to have in your mind an ideal of an untrammeled insurance market of any type, when it has to be heavily regulated to be of any use.