The point of insurance is to spread random risk around. Nobody complains that young women have cheaper car insurance than young men, or that young people have more expensive car insurance than older people, but cheaper health insurance. Young men are more likely to have car accidents, but less likely to have cancer. The point of insurance is not wealth redistribution or the spreading of systemic risk, but the spreading of random risk. (I mean this in the sense of 'systemic error' vs 'random error' that you will remember from high school physics.)
For instance wheelchair bound people have a much lower average live expectancy. The lives of people who are (born) disabled or have some debilitating genetic disease don't need society to make their lives even harder.
> If you have a higher chance of getting a disease, why wouldn't life insurance be more expensive?
The answer to that is: Not spreading such risks evenly among everyone is morally reprehensible. Imagine your reward for living in constant pain and having a higher chance of dying early is society kicking you in the balls for the crime of being born like that.
Discrimination is not inherently a bad thing. There are specific lists of special reasons, and discrimination on those bases is considered bad and has widely been made unlawful. Usually, insurance is an exception! And it should be. I don't see why men should subsidise the health insurance of women or why women should subsidise the car insurance of men. I don't see why the young should subsidise the health insurance of the old. That's not the point of insurance.
Also, it's law in many countries that you cannot discriminate against people on the basis of protected characteristics, no matter the mechanism or how unfair it may seem to those with privilege.
And we should change the law so that point of insurance is made illegal, and insurance companies can only use generic, broad, information about a person, not bend over so that they can maximize their profit margins and minimize their risks.
These are clearly not known risks. If you knew when you were going to die, you would not purchase life insurance, as the total premiums due by the date of your death would equal or exceed the insured amount.
If you knew a forest fire was bearing down on your house, you wouldn't be able to insure against it. And in many areas prone to forest fires, you cannot insure against them, because they are so likely to occur.
Hurricanes and flooding are similar: build on a floodplain and you will either pay exorbitant amounts for, or be unable to purchase, flooding insurance.
> Risks like unemployment which will effect nearly everyone at some point in their life
This is not true, and even if it were the risk you are hedging against is that it will happen to YOU at an unpredictable time.
That is obviously completely different from insuring yourself against a risk that has a higher chance of affecting you than the average person and expecting that risk not to be factored into your premiums.
> If the risks were unknown, no one would know that they should be buying insurance to hedge against them.
Do you just pattern match against words? Do you see "known risk" and just assume it means something I clearly did not mean and which makes absolutely no sense?
Societies have no reason to ensure insurance companies maximize their profits. In fact, briberry and lobbying aside, they have all the reason to regulate them for modest profits and wider spread safety net.
Thus health issues seen from DNA should be regulated to remain an unknown risk as far as insurance premiums go.
Except if somebody is more concerned about maximum insurance company profits, than for public health. In that case, can they suggest an Ayn Rand book for someone new to the author?
Guess what? Sane people in sane countries recognise that insurance isnt the best mechanism for accomplishing every social outcome. In fact, it is terrible at doing that for healthcare. So we dont use it that way. Instead, we do the sane thing of taxing people.
Instead you insane parochial exceptionalists think "hurr durr ill force everyone to buy insurance and ban insurance from taking into account people's health, basically making it not insurance". Then it confuses stupid people like YOU into not knowing what the term means.
Please microwave your balls. You are too stupid to be allowed to reproduce.
If it was about getting what you put in back, it would be a savings account.
I am sorry that you have been misled to think insurance is some sort of government wealth redistribution program but that just isn't so.
Yes, of course if someone has a disability that puts them at a higher risk of some event, and they want to insure themselves against that event, they'd pay higher insurance premiums. That's like, the entire point of insurance.
If you live in an area that is prone to flooding, then you either can't insure yourself against flood damage or the insurance premiums are a lot more expensive than someone living in a desert. If you smoke, your health insurance and life insurance premiums are higher. If you have type 1 diabetes, you will probably struggle to get any meaningful amount of life insurance.
What alternative are you proposing? That anyone purchasing insurance will automatically be expected to subsidise the insurance premiums of people that are at higher risk? That's not what insurance is for. If you want to redistribute wealth from people without disabilities to people with disabilities, then you can do that using taxes. But not by pretending there's anything wrong with honest risk assessment in insurance.
>The answer to that is: Not spreading such risks evenly among everyone is morally reprehensible. Imagine your reward for living in constant pain and having a higher chance of dying early is society kicking you in the balls for the crime of being born like that.
Nobody is being 'kicked in the balls'. Stop using such emotionally manipulative tactics and such charged language. Insurance is about spreading random risk. It is not for spreading systemic risk.
I don't think you understand the purpose of insurance at all.
Black men have a lower life expectancy and higher chances of certain illnesses or of being the victim of a violent crime than white men. If you put a race question on your life insurance form and incorporate that into your pricing you’ll be looking at a a brutal lawsuit.
Actuarial math is not some moral law that we are beholden to as a society. There are discriminations that we decide are unjust and make society worse even if they spread the costs of insurance more accurately.
It is not "unjust" to make more accurate predictions using the data you have available. It is fundamentally incapable of being unjust. Injustice comes from making wrong decisions, not from making right decisions.
You seem like the type of person that would declare statistics racist because it reveals facts you don't want to hear.
Justice is not derived from statistics. Espousing statistics does not justify racial discrimination.
We did not ban racial discrimination because we engaged with statistical arguments for racism and decided they were unfounded. A decision can be supported statistically (in some contrived way “right”) and be ethically wrong.
We undid legal racial discrimination because it’s morally repugnant.
That is exactly what we did. Legally entrenched racial discriminatiom was widely supported pretty much exactly up until science refuted scientific racism.
The whole argument against racism is that race doesn't matter, it is just a social construct, "race" is meaningless because there is more variability with races than between them, etc. That has always been a key argument against racism.
>We undid legal racial discrimination because it’s morally repugnant.
It is morally repugnant because it is incorrect. It would not be morally repugnant to discriminate racially if it wasn't baseless, just as it isn't morally repugnant to discriminate in any situation where it is justifiable.
For example nobody has a problem with not hiring a black man to play a white female character in a film. Nobody has a problem with having publicly funded breast cancer screening programs that are only available for women, even though in very rare cases males can get breast cancer.
Racism is morally repugnant when you make decisions based on race. It is obviously not morally repugnant if you are making decisions based on something else, and that happens to correlate with race. There is quite obviously nothing wrong with basing insurance premiums on all available information about someone, including genetic information.
Would you say it is morally repugnant to charge higher premiums to white people for skin cancer health insurance cover? Come on! Use your brain, man.
That's an interesting misunderstanding you have. Perhaps telling. From my perspective, the whole argument against racism is that it paints people as something other than individuals with unique backgrounds, perspectives, and positions in life.
On the contrary. People complain about stuff like this all the time.
An example: for whatever reason (genetic factors, stress, lifestyle factors) black people are much more likely to have high blood pressure than white people. That's a fact.
What do you suppose would happen if insurance companies tried to charge black people more money, or simply refused to cover them for conditions related to high blood pressure?
Yes. Ignorant people do. They lose the argument because they can't justify their position.
>What do you suppose would happen if insurance companies tried to charge black people more money, or simply refused to cover them for conditions related to high blood pressure?
Performative outrage from the insanely woke mainstream media, because racial issues drive ratings like nothing else.
Insurance companies wouldn't refuse to cover them for those conditions because it isn't good business sense, both for the above reason and because the rational thing is to charge a slightly higher premium.
Why should white people getting insurance subsidise the insurance of unhealthy people that make bad lifestyle choices just because those people happen to be black, but not otherwise?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
"While the best-known examples involve denial of credit and insurance, also sometimes attributed to redlining in many instances are denial of healthcare and the development of food deserts in minority neighborhoods."
You losers know nothing about history, geography or law. Your entire legal system is a running joke amongst lawyers in every other country in the world. Your "supreme court" spent 100 years being an activist political body, finally is saved by (of all people) a clown President, ans gets crucified for being "politicised" when it points out that a constitutional amendment that was passed in the era when every single state and every single country in the world banned abortion as murder probably shouldnt be interpreted as making it a constitutional right.
You are a joke country and a joke person. Fuck off.
> Yes.
Nice backpedaling. First it was "no one", now just "ignorant people".
The whole point of insurance is to create a risk pool. The more information one has, the less sense it makes to have insurance at all.
For example, suppose you had a genetic condition that made it a near-certainty you'd die of cancer. Under your model, no one would sell you cancer insurance.
On the other side of the coin, suppose you had a genetic condition that made you virtually immune to cancer. In that case, you'd be foolish to buy cancer insurance.
The insurance industry seems determined to slice and dice its way into irrelevancy.
Yes! Exactly. This is my entire point. The point of insurance is to spread around randomness, bad luck.
>For example, suppose you had a genetic condition that made it a near-certainty you'd die of cancer. Under your model, no one would sell you cancer insurance.
Yes, this is already how the world works already. This isn't "my model" it is just how insurance already works. It is based on an assessment of risk.
Note that you may still be able to get the insurance, but all you would be doing is hedging against the risk you get it sooner or later than you would expect to get it on average. Might still be useful if you have a mortgage and a young family.
>On the other side of the coin, suppose you had a genetic condition that made you virtually immune to cancer. In that case, you'd be foolish to buy cancer insurance.
Yes obviously...? This is why the first category exists too. If you allow people that know they're higher risk to insure but allow people that know they're lower risk not to, then insurance doesn't work. This is why you have a legal duty to disclose all relevant information in your possession to your insurance company.
I don't see backpedaling, I see a semi-concerted effort between two random individuals on what looks to be a prime opportunity to engage in their favorite pasttime: talking past the point and taking arguments with the least charitable interpretation to be able to definitively resolve a useless binary answer on a complicated subject.
you've been able to make them specify "no ignorant people" when they're making the claim, but why stop there? would any more drilling help qualify their statement further, like questioning the demographics of people that they interact with? how about questioning the racial makeup of their associates to point out their perspective COULD be biased towards specific types of thinking? have they surveyed and done single blind studies on finding out the proclaimable truth to the statement that "no one" truly makes this claim?
maybe they can adjust their statement to add more conditionals on what should be assumed premises: how about people who actively try to be illogical in arguments, they would disagree right? how about children who don't know anything about insurance, did they specify an age range where "no one" is applicable?
or is it possible you can read a statement like "no one would ___" to automatically not include people who would act/think/behave irrationally without needing a disclaimer and list of provided sources?
would it have been a good use of time to get any more clarification on the meaning of their statement with the included groups of people, or does the pedantic question framing to reach your "gotcha" and win the pointless online argument justify the narcissistic means?
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
Q.E.D.
Neither of us is "talking past the point", either.
> how about questioning the racial makeup of their associates to point out their perspective COULD be biased towards specific types of thinking?
Speaking of "talking past the point"...the race thing was just an example. Many people complain about insurance discrimination for reasons that have nothing to do with race.
In my opinion trusting anyone with your DNA makes you an asshole. The possibility of a leak, hack, misuse or government search (consensual or non-consensual) approaches 100% very rapidly over time.
It's not like they can't get your DNA in several ways without you volunteering it...
Or that they need your DNA to get to things about you, unless you're living incognito or something...