Life Insurance What Price Privacy
Below is a MRR and PLR article in category Finance -> subcategory Wealth Building.
Life Insurance: At What Cost to Privacy?
Overview
Once, privacy was a given unless you ran afoul of the law. Sadly, those days are behind us. It began with the government allowing tax authorities to invade your home without resistance?"and has spiraled from there.
Now, various entities can easily justify prying into personal lives, and private companies have eagerly joined this trend. The growing list of individuals with access to your private information is concerning.
The Issue with Life Insurance
The latest privacy concern involves life insurance companies targeting women with family histories of breast or ovarian cancer. Faulty genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, are linked to 10% of ovarian and 5% of breast cancers in Britain. The Association of British Insurers (ABI) aims to request permission to interrogate women about genetic testing for these mutations.
If the Genetics and Insurance Committee grants approval, women must disclose test results when applying for life insurance. A positive test could increase premiums or even deny coverage. While several European countries ban such intrusive questions, using genetic test results to hike premiums remains a possibility in Britain, despite a voluntary moratorium extended to 2011 that restricts questions to Huntington’s Disease and imposes value-based limits.
The Push for Genetic Information
The ABI hopes to gain approval to inquire about the cancer genes by year-end. This move stretches boundaries, as insurers are not even permitted to ask about an applicant’s HIV status. A study by Breakthrough Breast Cancer revealed that 28% of women might avoid genetic testing if results are disclosed to insurers.
Future Implications
Where could this lead? As genetics advances, insurance companies might demand access to a wide array of genetic tests before offering policies. This prospect raises alarm, prompting an alliance of scientists, unions, charities, and lawyers to urge the government to block any attempts to use genetic information in this manner.
Conclusion
Insurance remains a form of sophisticated gambling, where payouts depend on certain events. However, insurance companies seem intent on tipping the odds in their favor by accessing personal information that should remain private to each individual.
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