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Comment by huitzitziltzin | Hacker News Reader

The fact that 23andme is at risk as a going concern tells you what you need to know about the potential of monetizing large amounts of generic data. It turns out you can’t get much value from it. If you could, they would have.

And no I don’t think all of that DNA data would be valuable to the likes of a large health insurer like Humana or Aetna either.

The medical records you are imagining an insurer can link to genetic data are worth even less than these DNA sequences turned out to be worth.

Sincerely,

A former health economist who has worked both with tens of millions of inpatient discharge records, and (separately) a detailed survey which is complemented by genetic data.

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Candidly, given existing law in the US, the highest use an insurer could make of the data is to opt families into specialized preventative care using the DNA profiles in the database. They might make pretty decent profits taking that angle, and possibly generate significant goodwill.

How would that make them money? Every dollar saved in preventative care is $0.15 less profit, because insurers have a fixed profit margin as a percent of total care provided, due to the ACA's 85/15 rule .

The only reason to to do it would be to compete with a peer insurance company that is already doing it, resulting in less profit for both parties. The optimal strategy from the insurance profit perspective is to ban any DNA based cost saving measures for all insurance companies.

Setting aside for a moment whether this is feasible, an effective preventative care program would make the insurance program more competitive, in cost or quality. You're assuming employers and patients are just along for whatever anticompetitive ride insurers take them on. That would be a departure from marketplace fundamentals. The ACA also has safe harbors for process improvements .

On the feasibility point, if this use case is entirely infeasible I don't know what all the hand-wringing on this board is about!

No.

(Slightly longer answer: I don’t have the funds to match what someone is likely to pay for this data, but if I bought it and gave it to you for free, and also gave you all the inpatient hospital discharge abstracts in the US in a matchable form, plus whatever health data you want, plus family relationships, plus a budget for 100 PhDs, product managers, and marketing people for 5 years you couldn’t turn it into a viable product. (Indeed that is literally what 23andme tried to do for years!))

Thank you for sharing.

I have long suspected that the sequencing data isn't valuable except to law enforcement.

If it were as easy to link sequencing to diseases, we would have seen a rapid advances in our ability to address those diseases. The genetic data alone isn't enough of a predictor.

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