Global Breaking News - Monday, December 23, 2024

DNA and Insurance, Fate and Risk
As costs for DNA sequencing drop, hundreds of thousands of Americans are undergoing the procedure to see if they are at risk for inherited diseases. But while federal law bars employers and health insurers from seeking the results, insurers can still use them in all but three states when considering applications for life, disability and long-term care coverage. Should insurance companies be barred from seeing genetic information when considering those policies so people can get the tests without fear that the results would be used against them?
* DNA sequencing = DNA 염기서열 결정법/ at risk = 위험이 있는(에 처한)/ bar = 금지하다/ genetic information = 유전 정보

 유전자 정보가 특정 보험 상품을 사는데 소비자에게 불리하게 작용하지 않게 보험 회사들이 유전 정보를 보는 것을 금지 시켜야 하나요?

1. Risks Are Too Small for Insurers to Worry
Only the rarest hereditary disorders would create a major cost burden for insurers. They should agree to ignore genetic tests, and avoid a legal ban.

2. Guarantee Privacy to Ensure Proper Treatment
If the promise of the genetic revolution is to be fulfilled, the public must know that genetic testing will not endanger their economic security.

3. Questions Remain; Some Rules Should Be Clear
Even without barring insurers from seeing genetic tests, such tests should not be demanded of anyone. And research data must be kept private.

4. It’s Yet to Be Shown That Discrimination Exists
Only rare conditions can be predicted with certainty, and insurers can already access a variety of hereditary information about applicants.

5. Let Insurers Have Data and Trust to Get It Right
Advances in medicine have made it possible for insurers to offer coverage to more people, not fewer.

6. Test Results Are Not Always What They Seem
Even if insurers are allowed to consider the tests, they need to ensure they fully understand what results do and do not reveal.

Sample Essay

Risks Are Too Small for Insurers to Worry

Life, disability and long-term care and health insurers set premiums by judging the risks of future disease and death. To do this, they look at risk factors like age, sex, smoking, drinking, weight, family history and more. Should they be allowed to look at a healthy person’s genes also?

Genetic disease risk is a simple idea. Someone has a defect – a mutation – in a gene, and later on this could cause disease and premature death. Moreover, the mutation can be passed from parent to child, so the disease runs in families. Examples are Huntington’s disease, and inherited breast cancer. The disease risk can be extremely high, so if an insurer knows that a genetic test proves the mutation is present, premiums could be astronomical, or coverage could be denied. This seems unfair. Therefore, many would say, stop insurers from asking about genetic test results.

Insurers say this would expose them to “adverse selection,” meaning that people at high risk, who know a genetic test result, but need not disclose it, could get insurance below its true cost. This would mean higher premiums for everyone else, or worse.

Who is right? Arguably, both are. However, is genetic disease a real threat to insurers? A person must be healthy enough in early adulthood to buy insurance, and have a mutation that confers extreme risk by late middle age. So few people meet these conditions, modeling shows, that insurers would suffer negligible loss if they just ignored genetic tests. This is exactly what insurers have agreed to do, in several countries, including the United Kingdom.

In reality, severe risk conferred by mutations in single genes is rare and not typical of genetic contributions to disease. Current research is finding large numbers of locations on the genome, each associated with a small difference to risks of common diseases, like heart disease and cancers. Combining together, and interacting with lifestyle factors, these variations may alter the disease risk. Research is in its early days, but overall, these disease risks may lie within a range comparable to those associated with other risk factors used by insurers. This is unlikely to lead to dramatic changes, for insurers or for individuals.

While barring insurers from seeing test results for rare single-gene disorders might put them at a disadvantage when setting premiums, it might be best for the companies to pledge to ignore those tests unless we see more clearly that these disorders are truly a cause for greater concern.