Healthcare and Genetics
There are over 4,000 known genetic diseases, such as sickle cell anemia, Alzheimer’s, manic depression, Parkinson’s, and many forms of cancer. It’s easy to predict that as we continue to extract actionable knowledge from the human genome, we will find many more genetically induced diseases.
In the last half of this decade, based on technology that exists today, your doctor will give you a blood test to determine if you have inherited any genetic predispositions to any one of these life threatening and very expensive diseases.
Your first reaction might be, “I don’t want to know!” Your second reaction might be, “I definitely don’t want my insurance agent to know!” If these reactions fit how you feel today, I predict that you will, at some point in time, change how you think.
You will want to know if you have inherited a genetic disease and you will even want your insurance agent to know. Why? You can’t prevent or fix a problem if you don’t know it exists. When it comes to our health, we usually find out too late.
The future of healthcare needs to shift from its current break/fix model (you go to a doctor with a problem and they try to fix you) to a model of prevention – keeping you from having the problem in the first place. The result will be lower healthcare costs and a healthier population. If you know you’ve inherited a 95 percent or greater chance of contracting a serious medical problem, there are actions you can take today to keep from having the problem in the first place.
Prevention is difficult when you don’t have the facts. For example, when we tell our kids not to smoke, you’ll get cancer, they think we are just being parents and it really doesn’t matter if they smoke. After all, they have observed that some people smoke and die at a young age from lung cancer while other smoke and live to be quite old. You might remember seeing films of the oldest people on Earth. What were many of them doing? Smoking! So, it’s no wonder that kids think parents don’t know anything. The reality is, if you have a genetic predisposition to lung cancer and y9ou smoke cigarettes, you are lighting the fuse to a genetic bomb that eventually will go off. If you don’t smoke, the bomb will most likely not go off until you are in your 80s or 90s. If you don’t have the genetic bomb for lung cancer but you do smoke, then you will only have poor health, shortness of breath, more wrinkles and emphysema.
The problem today is, you don’t know if you have any genetic bombs, so you’re gambling and placing a lot of wrong bets. Kids could understand that. If you knew you had a genetic predisposition to addictive behavior, for instance, there are many things that could be done to avoid certain situations and preventive therapies that could help you from having the problem in the first place.
At this point, you may be thinking it would be all right to know if you had a predisposition to a genetic disease, but you still don’t want your insurance agent to know. To change how you think about this one, you have to know how insurance rates are set.
Basically, it’s all a matter of risk management on the part of insurance companies. For all they know, you might have inherited all 4,000 genetic diseases; therefore, your rates are very expensive. If a blood test showed that you definitely did not inherit 3,,999 expensive genetic diseases, they could drastically lower rates.
What about the one you did inherit, say, manic depression? Your insurance agent could help you get therapy before the problem became a big one. Why? It saves insurance companies money when you are healthy. The longer you live and the healthier you are, the more money they make. Let’s face it, you can still make insurance premium payments if you’re alive!
In time, your insurance agent will become a lifestyle counselor, helping you avoid any big health problems. Think of them as a health and wellness advocate for you and your family.
Daniel Burrus, one of the world's leading technology forecasters, business strategists, and author of six books
Copyright 2003 Author retains copyright. All Rights Reserved.
