I have a human physiology course right now, and in the associated lab we had a discussion about the human genome project and genome sequencing. Our professor brought it to out attention that in the next 5-7 years it's expected that individuals will be able to get their entire genome sequenced for only a few thousand dollars (less than 10). While that is still a high price, it is far from unreasonable and expected to continue to fall because of higher availability in the years after that. What I want to know is what you all think this will do to the health insurance industry.
Right now it is known that about 20% of people incur 80% of all medical expenses. The way insurance works is they don't know who falls into which category, so they charge everybody enough to pay everybody's bills (plus profit). There are questionaires about family/medical history and things like that to aid them in predicting which group you will fall into but they can't be certain now. However, there is a very real chance that within a decade, with a single test they will be able to place you with virtual certainty into the 80% of 'good' customers or the 20% of 'bad' customers. This means they can deny you insurance if you are certain to be too high a risk, or at best charge you extraordinary sums of money to have insurance.
My prediction is a pretty big collapse of the insurance industry. Those of us that fall into the 80% who have greater than a 99% chance of never racking up huge medical bills should be able to manage on our own until we start to get up there in years. The majority of people who pay insurance and keep the industry going will no longer be willing to do that, since the amount of medical bills they will be liable for in their young, healthy life will be very small. So there won't be anyone to pay the bills for those that need the money, besides themselves so they won't need insurance either, since they're footing the whole bill either way.
You are welcome to have the "
Gattaca" debate as a closely related issue to this is that it will also be cheap and easy to screen embryos prior to in-vitro fertilation, but there are other
threads more related to that already. Keep in mind what I'm talking about here is not genetically engeneering the perfect human(whatever the hell that is), but selection from your own genes for the least chance of gene-related illness in future children as well as likelihood of illness for those of us already born who inherited our genes the old fashioned way and the impact that will have on health insurance and healthcare in the future.