If the government encounters one of their kid's DNA, that's enough to identify them as a son/daughter of the person with that DNA profile.
If a medical insurance company purchases their DNA, analyzes it, and anticipates that a child of theirs is likely to have medical costs 5x the average, those costs will be passed on to those kids, absent legislation to the contrary.
This applies to everyone you're related to, as well.
> If the government encounters one of their kid's DNA, that's enough to identify them as a son/daughter of the person with that DNA profile.
I don't believe that's ever been tested in court (so there isn't precedence) and the ways in which DNA are complex enough - and the mutation rate is high enough - that it might be like fingerprints... if you're the only person with DNA that might be like the kind found and you've got some serious suspicion around you for other reasons... then they might be able to use it as supporting evidence or to compel you to submit to DNA testing to confirm the match (which apparently does have precedence in the US... wow America)
Uh, it absolutely has - and with more distant connections than direct parentage. See the recent Golden State Killer case for instance, as well as a myriad of others.
That shows it's enough to establish probable cause, but once they'd identified him, they got a direct DNA match, which means he won't be a test of the ancestral scenario outlined in the GP.
Yeah, this isn't science fiction or conspiracy theory anymore. Several high-profile cold cases have gone hot as police have been trawling the datasets submitted to 23AndMe et al and investigating the family trees of persons whose DNA is similar-ish to the samples in unsolved cases. [0]
The results are mainly bupkis anyway, and you're paying for the privilege of having police agencies across the country (world?) give extra scrutiny to you and all of your relations. No thanks.
It's all tradeoffs, I want some privacy, but I also like crimes being solved. In fact, I'd see that as a benefit even if I'm related to criminals. Of course this assumes it is used correctly and fairly, which is the hard part.
This is similar to the typical "encryption is for pedophiles" argument. Privacy doesn't mean that I am a criminal and/or my brother/sister/father/mother/children/cousins are murderers.
I also like ALL crimes to be solved and the guilty ones to get what they should, and the innocent ones to be living a life outside jail.
But we got something called "fundamental rights" (at least imho). One of them is privacy. NOT having an insurance company ripping me off because my father had X-Y-Z disease is another right I would like to have. They are already making billions as is. The ones that don't, should get their s..t straight and stop bleeding money for stupid reasons (yes I know from experience). No need to give them the bullet that will injure me (financially).
I think that all these DNA tests was a fad. Kinda like facebook was. People realize that they get very little value from it, and it most likely come back and kick them in the shin one way or another.
What about when devices come that are sensitive to read people's minds as they walk down the sidewalk ?
Monitoring citizens minds would be a tremendous boost to solving crimes. This rule will be equitably applied to all citizens by a fair and principled government excepting special groups like oppressed minorities or members of the government/military themselves.
I personally feel that privacy and individuality holds much more value than solving crime. I hope society never comes to the point that they'll allow government to do anything to them in order to provide "safety"
How so? They point out the difficulty balancing personal privacy and tools to identify criminals who have evaded justice. Just because you don't agree with the relative importance placed on either side doesn't make them dumb or naive.
What makes you naive is if you put any smidegeon of hope into the fact that insurance companies will not hesitate to buy and abuse such data to fuck you over left, right and central then you really are beyond help.
If you want to risk that, fine. But you're also screwing all your relatives in the same swell process.
And that's not only naive and dumb, that's totally reckless.
The solution to that is to abolish or neuter your insurance companies like the us in the rest of the world did. The fact that a private for-profit company decides if you live or die is absurd.
Last I checked, medical and life insurance is a thing everywhere else in the world as well. While a public healthcare system will pay for your treatment, it will not pay for the loss of earnings/business during your stay in the hospital and convalescence, nor will it pay you if you end up with a permanent disability (social security may cover a pittance of the latter).
it will not pay for the loss of earnings/business during your stay in the hospital and convalescence
I can't speak for other countries in Europe. But in Switzerland you have mandatory coverage from your employer.
The employer will pay your salary for a certain amount of time. After that insurance will kick in and pay (usually) 80% for up to a couple of years.
After that invalidity insurance kicks in. That's usually about 60% of your salary until retirement. You can buy added coverage to raise those percentages.
Bankrupcy for medical reasons is pretty much unheard of herearound.
That's why I also stuck the word "neuter" in there. It's not difficult to regulate what insurance companies are allowed to consider. Data brokerage can also be regulated (the GDPR would not allow 23andme to sell genetic data to insurance companies without strict opt-in)
the GDPR would not allow 23andme to sell genetic data to insurance companies without strict opt-in
That's true. But there's a different issue and the very reason why I would never do such testing.
An insurance company cannot enforce a genetic test on you in order to write a policy. What they can and will do, however, is ask you in the questionaire for such a policy if you did a genetic test and if yes they would oblige you to share the results before writing a policy.
The problem here is you can't lie. If you did a test and you deny it and it's proven later that you lied the insurance will refuse coverage.
So it's in your best interest not to get tested at all.
My understanding is that it's very different in the US. Such data is insanely valuable to insurers and that directly translates to the prices they're willing to pay for it.
Unethical? Sure as hell. Illegal? Probably not without a strong legal framework.
I think the level of "corrupt" is up for some debate, but it's pretty inarguable that the US pays substantially more for a system that is objectively worse in many ways.
>the US Healthcare system is second to none in the world
77th or so maybe to some, but definitely not second to anything, sure.
> The actual CARE people in the US get is the best in the world,
No, it's not consistently. The care a very small fraction get is, perhaps. But even for most of the people who get care it's not.
> It is fucking expensive and has issues with how we go about paying for it largely do to government regulations and interference in the market place
The places that provide equal or better outcomes at far lower prices (both per GDP and per capita) don't have less-regulated markets. So, no, I don't think you've identified the actual problem correctly, though I get that that's always going to be the explanation offered by those dogmatically devoted to the religion of laissez-faire.
I Honestly do hope the US does go Single Payer, we will see health care innovation and advancement stop, no new drugs, no new procedures, etc as almost 100% of that is funded by the very people you despise, the American people.
>The care a very small fraction gets is, perhaps. But even for most of the people who get the care it's not.
that is simply not true, most of the studies, rankings all factor in "access" due to price, if you remove price as a factor then there is no better system in the world
>>The places that provide equal or better outcomes at far lower prices (both per GDP and per capita) don't have less-regulated markets. So, no, I don't think you've identified the actual problem correctly,
I have, we have the worst of both systems. We have all the regulations of a Government-run system without the Price controls.
Single-Payer would be cheaper than our current model, it would also provide worse care.
The free market would be the best but I fear that ship has sailed, the world will need to destroy all innovation and collapse the health systems everywhere before anyone will want to try Free market again
Socialism always fails, the one thing keeping every other nations socialist system working is the American system, we pick up the slack, (just like in defense)
That is one of the reasons I become more and more isolationist every year.
> that is simply not true, most of the studies, rankings all factor in "access" due to price
That's because access due to price affects what care people actually get from the system.
> if you remove price as a factor then there is no better system in the world
No, even if you don't consider how ludicrously expensive the US healthcare system is, the outcomes it produces aren't exceptional.
Now, if you mean if you remove the actual effect price has on care the US system would be great, sure, but that's different than removing separate consideration of price as a factor. And impossible, as well.
Which has not been done in court? I work in juvenile dependency law and we use paternity-by-DNA to establish and disestablish fathers every day. Other divisions of the DOJ use DNA to establish parents for the purposes of childcare payments. There are loads of statutes and case law regarding DNA testing to determine parentage.
A parent/child relationship is crystal clear in the genetic data (barring the case where what you're actually seeing is an aunt or uncle and the child of their identical twin).
And I'm pretty sure paternity tests have a lot of precedent in US courts.
No, I mean that your identical twin's child will appear to be your child under a genetic test, for the obvious reason that you and your identical twin have the same genetics.
Actually, they are expressly prohibited from using your genetic information to make decisions about your coverage. It's the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) [1], where:
> ... health insurers may not use genetic information to make eligibility, coverage, underwriting or premium-setting decisions.
However, it doesn't apply to all insurance:
> It does not cover long-term care insurance, life insurance, or disability insurance.
Huh, had no idea, thanks for bringing that up.
Obvious follow-up question: Say the insurance company is using a third-party that they buy some kind of individual "healthiness/sickness benchmark" from, that just so happens to be heavily derived from on this genetic information, which the health insurer never sees in raw - would that fall under this? Seems like an easy way to skirt this regulation, but i am obv NAL.
This is good, but also leads to the obvious follow up question of how stringently it has and will be enforced. It's also illegal to lose PII and credit info for millions of people but, well, here we are.
Also, parallel construction. Also, data laundering - you drop DNA test data into a business analytics third party, and two data brokers later this arrives at your insurance company as a personal profile "created from data about your shopping habits collected on-line and off-line", or something like this. Don't know for sure if that's actually happening, but I assume it is.
How far removed from genetic data does the data have to be so that insurance companies can use it? Can I start a business that analyzes genetic data for know risk factors and then sell only the risk factors to insurance companies?
If a medical insurance company purchases their DNA, analyzes it, and anticipates that a child of theirs is likely to have medical costs 5x the average, those costs will be passed on to those kids, absent legislation to the contrary.
This applies to everyone you're related to, as well.