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.
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.