Why aren't the health insurance companies pleased? Doesn't early detection save them money?
Consider a world without GINA/other regulations and with simple actuarial pricing of insurance. Say you have a 1 in 100,000 risk of a disease costing $10k before a genetic test. After the genetic test, you risk is either 1 in 1,000,000 (if negative) or 1 in 10,000 (if positive). The insurance company would charge you $1.10 for a policy if untested, $11 for a policy if tested positive, and $0.11 for a policy if tested negative. These policies result in a 10% profit per person (ignoring admin costs, etc). If you lie about getting tested, that's grounds to revoke your policy.
As a result of GINA, people can get tested but the insurance company can't price insurance accordingly. As a result, the people with a negative test will drop coverage while people with a positive result will buy it, and prices will have to go up. If everyone behaved this way, then P(disease|buys insurance) = 1/10,000 in spite of the fact that P(disease)=1/100,000. Prices will rise to $11.
Price increases will reduce the quantity purchased (resulting in lower profits) and result in political/regulatory pushback.
Why aren't you going to get coverage? If you mean catastrophic coverage, the exchanges have them if you are young (under 30) or poor. It's not a terribly smart plan to have now that the other plans are available, but to each his own:
https://www.healthcare.gov/can-i-buy-a-catastrophic-plan/
If you're not poor you really should buy insurance, besides the obvious health benefits you're going to be paying 1% of your household income as a penalty in 2014, 2% in 2015 and 3% after that. Many people would pay more in penalties (and get nothing in return) than they would for getting insurance, it's a no brainer.
Also I only live in the US part of the year, and it's unclear which state I'm even allowed to buy insurance from (I have no US address right now). I'd certainly be paying for months of care I couldn't use since you can't buy month to month.
Lastly my income is low right now since I'm building a startup, so 1% won't hurt me much.
... Only a percentage (60%) and only after you reach the deductible (in my area that's over $6k), which is how these sort of high-deductible plans work (and is what I currently have because that's what was available before the exchanges). Again, from my link:
> A catastrophic plan generally requires you to pay all of your medical costs up to a certain amount, usually several thousand dollars. Costs for essential health benefits over that are generally paid by the insurance company.
Unlike a high-deductible plan that you may have now, the new ones do provide for 3 primary care visits annually as well as preventative care (essentially screenings and vaccines which end up saving everyone money).
> Lastly my income is low right now since I'm building a startup, so 1% won't hurt me much.
Since your income is low you would qualify for a subsidy and likely be able to get insurance for little to no cost. Or you could be bankrupted by some bad luck and pay a penalty for the privilege.
Many people (most?) would not have purchased health insurance when they were young and healthy, and they certainly would never purchase long-term care insurance.
Those people who get Health Insurance typically either get it as part of a Group Insurance Plan from a company (in which case, they insurance company gets a nicely mixed up group of healthy and unhealthy people).
With systems like 23andMe - otherwise healthy people now start loading up on various kinds of insurance, with a greater chance that the Insurance Company will have to pay out on the policy. It's somewhat like someone having advance notice of an arsonist in the neighborhood loading up on fire insurance. No guarantee that you will use it - but a much better chance than average.
>23andMe’s tests, designed to tell people if they're at risk for certain health conditions, could lead to an increase in care--necessary or not--which insurers could end up covering
Whoever reads this, be careful before having your DNA tested. In some countries (as, for instance my native Germany) you have the legal obligation (!) of sharing any relevant results with insurers before buying insurance.