Guilty until proven... guiltyFollow

It's not exactly the same as fingerprints. I agree a lot of the arguments you hear today were being told 100 years ago when fingerprinting became common. It was the same debate. People did the same ****, trying to find correlations between fingerprints and race, or between fingerprints and criminality. They had classifications of the curves of the fingerprints, and studies about those curves, and some came out saying that there was a correlation between the curves and the criminality, or the ethnicity, or the gender.

But insurance companies couldn't use your fingerprints to determine your chances of developing a disease. A fascist government couldn't use the fingerprint database to make ethnic cleansing a bit quicker and more thorough. An employer couldn't discriminate based on the info he finds on a fingerprint.

I think the worse is for health insurance companies, especially in the US where that's exclusively how healthcare works.

But insurance companies couldn't use your fingerprints to determine your chances of developing a disease. A fascist government couldn't use the fingerprint database to make ethnic cleansing a bit quicker and more thorough. An employer couldn't discriminate based on the info he finds on a fingerprint.

I think the worse is for health insurance companies, especially in the US where that's exclusively how healthcare works.


If it becomes that effective of a tool they'll just require it of people before insuring them at all. It's just one more actuarial tool. The problem isn't that "insurance companies might use it" the problem is that we allow insurance companies to be for profit entities.

I completly agree. But then the DNA thing only exacerbates this problem.

We're both preaching to the choir. I don't think law enforcement's ability to solve crimes should ever trump privacy, but pragmatically, in the society we live in, this is going to happen, and it's eventually going to be routine to add children's DNA to this database at or before birth. It's far too handy from a utilitarian standpoint of those in power and far too easy to sell to the masses as harmless and non invasive.

The best hope for it not becoming ubiquitous in the US at least, is sadly some sort of crazy "number of the beast" biblical prophecy angle that the hoppleheads might latch onto to fight it.

Nothing.

But as a healthcare system, it sucks. An insurance company wants to insure healthy people, so that it spends as little money as possible on treatment. Conversly, it doesn't want to insure old/sick people cos they'll be expensive to treat. So they set their premiums prohibitively high for these people, so that they either don't take insurance, or if they do the company recoups its losses throuh those high premiums.

Meanwhile, healthy/young people don't really need health insurance, so they don't take it, which reduces profits for insrance companies, who pass on the cost to their existing clients, sick/old people. It's a vicious cycle. And the US government ends up spending more on healthcare per person than the UK or France, who both have free public healthcare.

That system is bad enough. But if you add to this the fact that insurance companis can now see how likely it is that someone will develop a serious illness, then it screws up the system even more. The whole concept of insurance is that its a form of betting or gambling. You give them money each month in case something happens. If the insurance companies knows what's gonna happen, if they have all the information they need, the deal is skewed. They'll either charge you enough in premiums so that you it's barely worth it for you and zero loss for them, or they won't take you at all.

Make the DNA information available to the person as well as the insurance company(s).

Your reading comprehension skills are terrifying. I imagine a lot of Gbaji posts make a great deal of sense to you.

I'm with you on this one Red. I hope it is stricken down, and all DNA samples have to be wiped. Though, being the massive distruster of government I am, unless I'm personally supervising it, I don't believe it'll ever happen.

You assume that I actually read most of the thread. Or any of gbaji's posts.

And he's a better speller too!

Amazing!

After years and years of Gbaji typing ******** and you doubted it?