The Economist frets about the coming revolution in health insurance. Cheap and widespread genetic screening, it claims, will result in discrimination based on predisposition to disease. This seems a very odd thing to be worried about. Knowing an individual’s disease risk doesn’t change the overall prevalence, so the total amount of insurance required is not going to rise. If anything, it will fall slightly as the margin of error in guessing one’s risk of disease is tightened. What we will see is a redistribution of the insurance burden, with the genetically fortunate buying less while the unlucky buy more. This is unfortunate for some, but as Mankiw and others have pointed out there are so many other genetic predispositions to wealth; there is no obvious reason to pick on only those traits which happen to fall within that loosely defined category of ‘disease’.
For those who think this is a little callous, take heart. More costly insurance is a powerful incentive for the market to provide sufferers with cures (or better, preventative treatments) for the most serious aliments. Indeed, a well-informed insurer has a great incentive to do everything it can to prevent a disposition becoming a disease. It seems the only people who have anything to lose from genetic screening in the long run are the insurance companies.
