Notes on Genetic Insurance

My idea of genetic insurance created some controversy with Randall Parker at FuturePundit, Brock Sides at Signifying Nothing, and MR's guest blogger Lloyd Cohen raising some objections. One of the objections that all three had in common (dealt with in my papers but not in the post) is that adverse selection is still a problem if people lie about having taken a test. This minor problem is easily handled, however. Insurance companies could have a clause in the contract forbidding previous tests. We don't worry so much about people having a theft and then buying home insurance and the issue here is quite similar. (See my papers for a little more on this issue).

Randall at FuturePundit, however, raises a more serious problem. As the price of genetic tests falls it will soon be economic to sequence a person's entire genome at birth or even before (see Randall's posts for some links on costs). In this case, genetic insurance works only if the parents buy the insurance. This is not so implausible (especially not for those who have their child's DNA sequenced!) but it is a real issue. (We should also remember that genetic insurance will be quite cheap because most people do not have serious genetic defects.) If we have genetic insurance today, however, we can perhaps avoid the adverse selection problem for a couple of decades and that may be good enough for one of two things to happen 1) genetic engineering will reduce the need for insurance (sequencing is much more valuable if there is genetic engineering to correct defects) or 2) genetic insurance could evolve into a more Rawlsian scheme (perhaps involving government at some level) in which payments are made at birth to compensate for Nature's genetic lottery.