Skin Cancer and Life Insurance
"Each Skin Cancers case represents a documented consumer. See what quotes were received by other people with the same health condition, before approaching your own broker. Knowledge makes you a smarter consumer."
Life IQ
Genetic Screening and Life Insurance
"It has been known for over 25 years that a deficiency of DNA repair can cause cancer. The classical case is the recessive autosomal mutation Xeroderma pigmentosum, which causes a serious skin disease. Patients with the disease lack the ability to repair the DNA lesions caused by ultraviolet light irradiation and they invariably develop skin cancer. In recent years, several genes involved in the repair of mispaired nucleotides, mismatched repair, have been characterized and localized.
"...the fact that people can obtain information about mutations that are likely to shorten their life expectancy may become important in securing life insurance. Attempts to prevent genetic data from reaching insurance companies are not likely to be successful in that insurance companies can require the right of access to medical records as a condition to considering insurability.
"If egalitarian theories are to be followed, the cost of this insurance risk would be shared without penalty across the pool of insured people. If either utilitarian or libertarian theories are adopted, susceptible persons might be excluded from the pool of insured, or they might be charged higher premiums. It could be foreseen that persons who know that they carry a life-shortening genetic condition might purchase large amounts of life insurance and that, in turn, could cause an economic deterioration of the insurance system.
"Susceptibility to Environmental Hazards," Environmental Health Perspectives 105, Supplement 4, June 1997
Prepared by the Scientific Group on Methodologies for the Safety Evaluation of Chemicals
