Basically, they want to be able to predict which customers or potential customers are more likely to get sick or require costly treatment during the life of the plan, presumably for discriminatory purposes. I’m not sure if health insurance companies will be able to use this information for discrimination even if this…

Thank you saying this! I’m in my 20's and already on disability due to a very rare genetic condition and a few other health issues. The medicine for my genetic condition is $25,000 a dose (that I get weekly) and there’s no cure or alternative. Basically, I’ll have to do this for the rest of my life. When people say…

I started to realize it was absolute crap a few years ago as our employer sponsored healthcare kept eroding (and I worked for a multi billion dollar global company), but when I moved home and got my pinko commie socialized medicine again, I was floored at the difference. I almost wept when my health card came in the…

I refuse to take part in my company’s wellness program because I don’t want them to use that data against me. I’m fat and I’m waiting for when that is used against me.

Genetic testing used for offsetting financial burden is the next brick in the wall where the haves subjugate the have-nots (or as Marco Rubio calls them “the soon to haves”—fucking asshole)

I have never understood why employers are given control over insurance in the first place. I mean, I know it has to do with being able to work with larger, more stable pools of people, but still – the idea that you have to get a job at a certain company in order to get good health care is completely absurd. Sure,…

Yes. My employer has a wellness program that we are required to partake in (or you pay more on health insurance). It isn’t too bad—basically get a indicator of key health metric twice a year rather than at an annual physical. I wonder how long it is before there are penalties for smoking, for being overweight, or for…

You would think they would be all for abortion since all of this is for naught if the “genetically inferior” successfully reproduce.

Oh shit, you cracked the code. They don’t mean less government, they mean literally governing the smallest places.

I didn’t even fully understand how terrible US healthcare was until my partner and I started volunteering for an NGO in Colombia. I have type-1 diabetes and recently caught the flu here, which required me to spend a week in the hospital (two days of that in a special care unit). My total cost: $0.00. We’re both…

If we give insurance companies 100% benefit of the doubt, which I don’t, let’s assume that this is done so they can model out and price their actuarial liability over time. For example, if they know they are insuring X number of people with XYZ genetic markers for a disease, they can forecast their revenues and…

If you’re a terrible person who runs a health insurance company, being able to exclude people who might get cancer or develop Parkinsons or some other genetic disorder is a way to keep payments down and profits up, and for the employer, keeping premiums lower.

In addition to the horrors you so accurately describe, there’s also the fact that outside of the highest-end genetic labs, there’s a wide range of errors that can easily take place in genetic testing. A significant percentage of studies involving genetic testing ultimately are proven to be bunk because the researchers…

Well I agree that this is a scary bill but privacy issues exist in state-run systems as well. For instance here in Denmark having a history of treatment for mental illness can prevent you from getting jobs, or a driver’s license. I just always feel the need to pipe in when people start to sound a little too…

There’s a eugenics bent to all of this that’s really frightening. The idea that people who need to use a lot of healthcare are dragging the whole world down and should be allowed to die off so as to “strengthen the herd.”

Their ultimate goal is to only sell insurance to people who don’t need insurance. That would be the perfect business model, as far as they’re concerned.

I’ve posted this elsewhere, but it bears repeating - this opens the door for people like me, who almost certainly carry genetic markers for multiple cancers, to be denied health insurance, because I’m “too much of a risk” to insure. It could turn “bad genes” into a pre-existing condition.

Insurance companies are liking their lips at the notion they could charge people more based on diseases they COULD get.

it’s just insane that health insurance is tied to employment, isn’t it?

Speaking of federal protections, somebody else shared this link on a different post here earlier and I feel like it’s a pretty believable theory: