[technocratius]

My primary concern with these are: what will it mean in a possible future to know your risk profile, and your ability to get/maintain health insurance, also without having to pay premiums. I live in the Netherlands, so probably not too much, but US could be different, and who knows what the future holds. Anyway, this makes me less/not want to take them...

[marc__1]

In the USA there is The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act from 2008 that bars insurance discrimination based on your genes. I assume this will become a landmark law in the next 50 years as society becomes familiarized with routine blood (I mean gene) tests to drive preventive care to the next level

https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/policy-issues/Genetic-...

[loeg]

It shouldn't be a problem in the US. The ACA requires insurers to insure people with pre-existing conditions. (And GINA is also relevant here, as sibling mentioned. I was struggling to remember its name.)

[chimeracoder]

> It shouldn't be a problem in the US. The ACA requires insurers to insure people with pre-existing conditions.

The ACA requires insurers to cover people under the age of 65 with pre-existing conditions and, more importantly, requires them to provide coverage at the same prices regardless of those conditions (they can only set price using a few pieces of information: age, zip code, smoking status, etc.). However, there are a lot of ways that insurers already skirt that second part, such as offering "discounts" to patients for certain elections which are strongly negatively correlated with various pre-existing conditions.

Furthermore, the ACA has seen a number of challenges over the last few years - most recently, the requirement to cover preventive care at no cost to the patient was struck down a few months ago. There's plenty of reason to suspect that this provision will be challenged in the future as well, and could easily be overturned.

[lotsofpulp]

> However, there are a lot of ways that insurers already skirt that second part, such as offering "discounts" to patients for certain elections which are strongly negatively correlated with various pre-existing conditions.

Can you give any examples?

[EvanAnderson]

I agree with you re: the ACA hanging around unscathed. That seems like a bad gamble. Striking it down completely seems politically unlikely, but then there's Roe v. Wade.

[Wohlf]

They aren't skirting anything, discounts were explicitly written in to the ACA to encourage behaviors the government and insurance companies both wanted.

[autoexec]

I wonder if this could keep you from even being hired for a job. Given two otherwise equal candidates I can imagine some companies may wish to choose the one which doesn't have a risk for a major cancer.

[dragonwriter]

It could be, though in the US this type of thing has been anticipated, hence the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act of 2008.

[ethbr1]

And critically, that's banned at common points of use, rather than collection.

Which I think is more important given how leaky a sieve prohibiting the multitudinous hydra that collection is.

Although I wouldn't be sad to see strict laws around genetic info storage too. Toxic waste, etc.

[carbocation]

GINA should protect you against this (for health insurance) in the US but it does not necessarily extend to other forms of insurance.

[kulahan]

GINA needs to be much, much stronger for me to feel safe. There's a lot of potential money to be made from genetic information.

[ethbr1]

There's a lot of money to be made from a lot of enriched genetic information.

Is there a lot of money to be made from one individual's genetic information?

[rlabrecque]

yes.

[pfisherman]

The sci-fi use case is that an prognostic / diagnostic / active learning agent pulling information from EHRs would use this as a prior.

More low tech is that you and your physician are more vigilant when it comes to monitoring or testing for certain types of cancer if you have a high impact onco-variant.

Keep in mind that prognosis for cancer improves dramatically when you can detect it early.

[Gibbon1]

Even more sci-fi might be drugs that can mitigate the risk. Notable is the recent cocktail of drugs that coax the defective protein in CF to functioning better. There is one cancer gene I know that causes people to develop polyps in their intestines which then go on to become cancerous. Imagine a drug that stops that.

[pfisherman]

One of the weird things about oncogenes that I have observed is that there is a balance. Perturb them too far one way and you get cancer. Perturb them too far the other and you get a developmental disorder. This is not at all rigorously documented or studied. Just an anecdotal observation.