Bizarre. Reminds me of an old rant that was circulating in email a while back. It was credited to George Carlin, even though that great worthy had nothing to do with it.
Regardless, this strikes me as merely an attempt to get attention by saying something that sounds provocative but really isn't. His arguments are more in favor of voluntarily providing information (like genetic data) to get lower insurance rates because he doesn't have a genetic predispostion to something like, let's say colon cancer. In an ideal world, that would be great. It's like getting a good driver discount on your auto insurance. But we don't live in an ideal world.
There are two flaws with the author's thinking. The first is that a genetic predisposition is, in most cases, going to have less of an effect in the long run than any of the known environmental variables that affect any such conditions. As an example, the BRCA genes that have been implicated in breast cancer only raise the chances of breast cancer by a miniscule amount. I don't remember the exact number, and I'm too lazy to dig up the info right now. It's one of those things where a woman with breast cancer almost always has the mutation, but not every woman with the mutation will get breast cancer. Environmental variables are going to have a much bigger impact in most cases than any genetic predisposition. If health insurers were in the habit of giving discounts based on risk, you would probably get a better discount if you could prove that you eat healthy and exercise.
The second flaw with the "I favor discrimination" concept is that GINA wasn't passed to prevent the voluntary exchange of information to help you negotiate better interest rates. GINA was passed so that no individual could be denied health insurance on the basis of some supposed genetic risk. It prevents you from being denied health insurance because heart disease runs in your family, for example. The issue is not that people would be charged higher premiums for their insurance. The issue is that those people would simply not be insured at all. GINA was designed to protect those people.
How many people here have GID (Rhetorical question)? And how many people (in the US) have insurance coverage that pays for treatment related to your GID (another rhetorical question)? I don't. My therapy visits are covered because I have major depression. The depression is a result of the GID, of course, but my insurance doesn't pay for GID-related therapy. They pay for depression-related therapy. Whether GID has any genetic components is not the issue I'm trying to raise. I'm pointing out that insurance companies already decide whether to cover certain treatments or not, genetic or not. If the insurers had access to genetic information, they would simply deny coverage for an even broader range of diseases/conditions than they do currently.
Imagine knowing that you were a carrier for a debilitating genetic disease, that your partner is also a carrier for said disease, and your insurance company decides it's too great a risk to insure your children because they might actually have the disease. And that's exactly what they would do. I'd be fine paying a higher premium to have insurance cover expenses related to a genetic disease. Or GID. Or whatever your insurance company might deny you coverage for. But that's not an option; that's not how the system works. Michael Rozoff has his head lodged so far up his a$$ that he doesn't even realize that this is not how we do business here in the US. We simply deny coverage to people that are too great a risk. This is how insurance companies save money, and return a profit to their investors.
