> Looking, you’re right. Those are regulated at the state level. But it does look like pretty much every state has a law.
The 1st state I checked to validate that, my own, doesn't. The state level laws much like the GINA act only cover employment and health insurance. There is a newly enacted law preventing consumer genetic testing companies from disclosing results without consumer consent, but nothing stopping an insurance company requiring consent for access or requiring their own genetic testing before issuing life or disability insurance. Based upon this I'm not comforted by the assertion that "pretty much every state has a law".
> preventing consumer genetic testing companies from disclosing results without consumer consent
Even if you didn’t consent, genetic genealogy can still be used to triangulate your genome from relatives of yours who do consent. This is still a manual process for now, but it’s very likely that a CODIS-like system to automate DNA triangulation for purposes of fingerprint search will be implemented soon. Only a small step from there to insurance companies being able to deny you coverage based on an “sub-clinical family history” of something.
My previous comment was more about not trusting the comment about state level protection than having an issue with that lack of protection. Life and disability insurance companies already deny coverage based upon "sub-clinical family history" of conditions. They do so based upon gathered family medical histories. They will also deny you coverage based upon a required medical examination. What is the issue with adding genetic screening to the list of tools?
> Life and disability insurance companies already deny coverage based upon "sub-clinical family history" of conditions. They do so based upon gathered family medical histories.
The term "sub-clinical" means "something that has not yet caused you any problems bad enough that you mention them to a doctor, and therefore never makes it into your medical history; and which also would not yet be revealed by a medical examination."
To be clear, a "sub-clinical family history", then, isn't information about your sub-clinical conditions attained from medical data about your family's clinical interactions (that would be a regular family history!); rather, it's information about your clinical or sub-clinical conditions, deduced through triangulation of your (potentially quite distant!) relatives' sub-clinical conditions, which were in turn discovered through genetic screening of those distant relatives, that they themselves did consent to, as some presumed-boilerplate when submitting their DNA to ancestry websites and the like.
There is currently no way for insurance companies to be aware of your "sub-clinical family history" besides just asking you. With automated triangulated genetic screening, they would have a way to get around asking you.
Which makes the process of dismantling or avoiding the regulation actually slightly easier because all you need is one state to defect in order to cause a precedent which then allows for a regulatory cascade.
It’s almost deterministic at this point, and you see how they did it for clawing back reproductive rights.
And this issue is obscure enough for a small enough current population, that you would not be able to actually build a robust counter protest in any kind of sensible way.
So really all it would take is a handful of just Millionaires to care about this problem to throw — let’s call it $10 million - at lobbying in order to make it go their direction.
(downvote all you want but look at the supreme court, Dobbs, and the inability of the democratic party to hold on to power at all--at some point the excuses need to end and the party needs to be judged on the basis of where we've actually wound up)
They also take into account smoking. Playing devil's advocate if a car insurance company can charge you a higher premium because you are male why shouldn't a life insurance company use your genetic code?
