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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Exactly right. The one that came in conversation waiting for the eclipse was genetic editing of fetuses to eliminate inherited disease. Setting aside the whole 'designer babies' as a distraction imagine a company that give free genetic treatment for couples seeking to avoid passing on known bad genes. When you walk that forward and look at the cost associated with treating, diagnosing, and supporting people that later get the disease, you begin to see a huge economic 'win' by giving them free genetic help early.

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Why would you expect that treatment to be free?

If the cost of editing is not exorbitant (i.e. is lower than the average per-capita cost of paying for the condition being edited away), healthcare providers would be incentivized to pay for the editing to reduce their costs.

The incentives are obviously stronger in single-payer countries, but even in the US you could imagine an insurance company that competed on lower premiums conditional upon certain gene edits being applied to covered children.

> in the US you could imagine an insurance company that competed on lower premiums conditional upon certain gene edits being applied to covered children.

On one hand, this sounds entirely economically reasonable (and even humanitarian).

On the other hand, I fear this would inevitably produce unintended consequences that would shape our society in distopian, sci-fi/horror-flavored ways.

I have no idea how it would actually shake out. Maybe I'm just being anti-intellectual here.

Given the economics, I feel pretty confident predicting that these edits will be mandatory before most people on this site die.

At least you'd probably have to pay a lot more of the bills if you chose not to have genetic problems corrected before birth.

Expect is perhaps too strong a word, the calculus would be the cost burden of providing services and treating the diseases in the uninsured to the cost of providing the genetic services at the start.

The thing is... Abortion is so much cheaper than gene editing, and it gets all the cells at once. More likely is insurance companies try to deny coverage for people with genetic conditions diagnosed before they were born. While this would not fly in todays environment, it is where the economic incentives point.

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