The next time you apply for individual health insurance, be prepared for a variety of preliminary screening test procedures to see if the insurer will reject or accept you, including: blood, urine, alcohol or smoking tests and composition evaluation genetics.

In the individual private healthcare market there is the concept of underwriting health insurance. It involves evaluating and quantifying a potential applicant requesting coverage as a potential liability or risk to the insurer from a professional underwriter. The process is similar to applying for a loan at a commercial bank. There are basically three types of risk that the insurer will detect.

(1) Physical risk; The main concern regarding the applicant. In this context, the problem is related to the medical condition of the proposed insured or a propensity for cancer determined by family history.
(2) moral hazard; A potential insurer would forego considering an application entirely if there was any explicit or implicit evidence that the applicant is involved in dangerous hobbies, sports, or occupations.
(3) moral hazard; An insurer will definitely try to avoid the speculation of insuring an applicant who has a penchant for suicidal tendencies, criminal behavior, and certain lifestyle habits or tendencies.

For years, insurers relied on the reliance on multiple subsystems derived from the strategic cumulative integration of smart computers to draw their conclusions for risk assessment purposes. A new technology currently in pilot phases funded through Kaiser University has discovered a statistical methodology to determine and unify the three risk categories in unison during real time for the purpose of medical underwriting using risk scoring algorithms. genetically calculated. It is a highly interoperable biometric detection application interconnected to a plurality of relational health databases. The silicon apparatus uses an infrared thermal touch screen sensor as a biometric identifier that verifies the integrity of an applicant’s personal genetic profile with razor-sharp precision by crediting their fingerprints against federal law enforcement databases, national systems automated verification checks and a compilation of tabulated data. DNA repositories.

DNA?

Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes that contain their DNA pattern. One member of each chromosome pair comes from your mother, the other comes from your father. Every cell in a human body contains a copy of this DNA. The vast majority of DNA does not differ from person to person, but 0.10 percent of a person’s entire genome would be unique to each individual. This represents 3 million base pairs of DNA. In clinical studies, this percentile has been shown to be significant enough to structurally compose predictive assessments of significant importance to an insurance company, including the approximation of trends in personal behavior, psychological competence, and expectation of mortality or morbidity. It has been so competent in detecting risks that a law was recently passed to protect employees and insured applicants from their discriminatory bias known as the Non-Discriminatory Genetic Information Law. However, the act is complicated by claims imposed directly or indirectly by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which imposes few restrictions on the information that HIPPA-covered entities can share.

What does my DNA have to do with my health insurance?

Over the past decades, insurance companies began storing data from many of the popular DNA databases such as the Automated Integrated Fingerprint Identification System and CODIS with proprietary mixed-use commercial data sets such as Ingenix, Physician Computer. Network, Intelliscript, Medical Information Bureau, and even Secure Flight. Passenger data compiled by the Transportation Security Administration. The so-called purpose of this was for authentication and with the recent warning of identity theft from electronic health records, the authenticity of an applicant was the alibi that insurance companies needed to exploit and get away with, at the same time creating a stronger subscription system. Just remember that the next time you visit the general practitioner, you have signed a request form authorizing all parties managing your care to share knowledge about your health, which in unique circumstances grants special permissions to all of the parties listed above.

How this new system works.

A fingerprint is made up of a series of ridges and valleys on the surface of the finger. The ridges are the segments of the upper layer of the skin of the finger and the valleys are the lower segments. The ridges form the so-called minute points: ridge endings (where a ridge ends) and ridge bifurcations (where one ridge splits in two). There are many types of minutiae, including points (very small ridges), islands (ridges slightly longer than dots, occupying a middle space between two temporarily divergent ridges), ponds or lakes (empty spaces between two temporarily divergent ridges), spurs (a notch that protrudes from a ridge), bridges (small ridges that join two adjacent longer ridges) and crosses (two ridges that cross each other). There are five basic fingerprint patterns: arch, tent arch, left loop, right loop, and whorl. Loops make up 60% of all fingerprints, whorls make up 30%, and arches 10%. Fingerprints are generally considered unique, with no two fingers having the exact same dermal ridge characteristics. The biometric device measures the kinetic heat frequencies of an applicants contact spread through minute points and automates a recognition key cipher query from the ridges via a call interface sent by an encrypted terminal control program . Basically, the examiner will inquire based on the information presented to him and will wait for a response from the central computer in the remote vicinity. I don’t know about you, but somehow the idea of ​​my data traveling through a typical client / server type architecture doesn’t make me feel comfortable at all. Imagine all the mistakes that can go wrong. The new system is ready for attacks at all social levels, in addition to invading all our privacy rights as citizens, regardless of the requirements for coverage.

There is something you can do.

If you do not want insurance companies to have access to your confidential private health information, among many other things, such as your financial prowess, consumption, personality or lifestyle, the first thing you can do is avoid applying with Kaiser Permanent or anyone of the fellows. members of insurance companies owned by the National Electronic Information Corporation, it’s bad enough that we have to be ordered by the Office of Medical Information just to get health insurance in the first place.

The second thing you can do is visit our website to find more information about health insurance or simply leave your information (in order to protect your privacy, you do not need to leave any other information that you are not comfortable sharing). provide competitive quotes from major health insurance companies that are not involved in this practice. Not all insurance companies participate in this type of screening procedure, but you will probably want to avoid the companies that do, as once you are in the system, you are in that place you do not want to be if you value your health care. and how much do you spend on it.