I suppose without this bill, a black market in genetic testing would develop. You’d want to be informed about your person risk factors, but have strong incentive to not tell your doctor and insurance company.
Why support this loony over the other loonies in the first place?
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise.
I would prefer to pay tolls as opposed to taxes, and service fees to police as opposed to taxes, and tuition fees to schools as opposed to taxes. Because then I am choosing what I want to pay for as opposed to having it taken from me by force, which is fundamentally unethical.
Yes, because privatizing law enforcement does wonders for your property rights. Well it does if you can buy the bigger and better army.
How’s that?
Why did you ever have any support for Ron Paul in the first place?
The majority of people in this country wouldn’t. You live in a democracy. OH SO UNFAIR TO YOU
I find it pretty humorous that libertarians think that property rights even have meaning outside the notion of a social contract. Of course they can’t just say that’s what it is because then they’d have to admit our ability to define other social contracts – like taxes, public schools and health care reform. On the other hand, they really don’t have a very good way of defining property rights any other way except to demand that “they exist, goddamit, so get off my lawn!”
Shit man, you must really hate car insurance then.
I mean that the lack of the kind of IT they have now meant they didn’t have the capability to judge on a case by case basis nor did they have reasonable access to the information they needed even if they wanted to. As such, they needed a big base of customers to offset the risks that they knew statistically they faced.
Today there is a lot more information and they have the capability to process it.
Like the law enforcement we have now is doing such a great job? What with wrong-door SWAT raids, drug war arrests, informants making up stuff to get a better deal with the prosecutor, cops with search warrants that always shoot the family dog “because it was threatening”, letting each other get away with speeding or other “minor” infractions, etc. etc. etc.
Though this is getting off on a tangent from the OP.
I’m as much of a free-market, keep the government out of everything guy as you’ll find around here but seriously Rollory…come on dude.
If insurance companies can just cherry pick only healthy people then what the hell are they insuring? Nothing. They’re just collecting money from healthy people for doing nothing.
I meant that Ron Paul and most people who agree with him don’t object to a government-run police force.
There is a lot more information, but not everyone can have access to it. Banks can’t get your race and gender except to ask for it and they can’t make it mandatory. If it was mandatory, there’d be a huge swath of the population that would could never buy a house.
Well Rollory does.
Go ask the Iraqies how well those militias are working out for them.
Process what? A person’s risk? That basically turns into not insurance, but straight paying for health care uninsured as Spoofychop says. Insurance isn’t working then because it doesn’t exist.
Yeah, that whole “letting people who probably can’t afford it buy a house” thing has worked out pretty well.
This reminds me of the movie Gattaca, particularly at the beginning when Ethan Hawke’s character was born and they immediately began reading off all the thing he was genetically disposed towards.
Imagine having a baby and being told either that your insurance premiums were going to skyrocket or that you were losing your insurance altogether because the company didn’t want to take the risk because they saw something in the baby that concerned them.
Part of the reason we have a healtcare crisis in this country is because cases like that are already beginning to happen, where people are denied affordable health insurance due to known health issues. Another reason for national healthcare, I guess.
You might, if you look around, notice that being a certain race or gender doesn’t mean you can’t afford to buy a house.
Yeah, so why is Dirt implying that banks would be irrational about doling out loans?
What Rollory is saying insurance companies should do is perfectly rational from the insurance company’s perspective – minimizing risk and maximizing profit. Banks would want to behave rationally, too – by giving loans to anybody who they think will be able to pay it back. If a bank wants to be stupid and deny loans to qualified customers because of where their great-great-grandparents were from, then there will be plenty of other, more rational banks willing to give a loan to that same customer.
The insurance thing is different, because it wouldn’t be in the interest of any insurance company to insure these customers.
My post was stupid, but what I was responding to was Dirt’s absurd irrationality. If this discussion is about market failure, you should be talking about places where discrimination is rational (like insurance) not irrational (like bank loans).
Except banks (and credit lenders of all kinds) HATE customers who repay their loans in full and on time. It’s much better to give a loan to somebody who you know is unreliable, so you can charge them interest for the rest of their lives.
CHACHING.