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Replying To:
Another Consideration... (none / 0) (#3)
by Anonymous User on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 11:01:47 AM PDT

While your doctor may not mis-use your medical history, there may be nothing to prevent this genetics organization from passing on your medical history to something like the Medical Information Bureau (MIB). While the intent of the MIB is to prevent insurance fraud and reduce risk to the insurance companies, I suspect that they are looking to mine more and more data to assist in developing underwriting models that exclude coverage for certain conditions and histories. Giving up your SSN to a genetics organization, along with an extensive medical history (where you may be more honest in the interest of "research") could put an individual at some risk for coverage denial or rate increases. I don't want to go all black helicopter here, but it does concern me when information agregators start getting hold of medical information. If you think you have trouble with your credit scores and identity theft, imagine if you couldn't get insurance because someone messed with your medical history or the wrong test result was reported -- or simply because a bean counter assigned a higher risk to you because a genetics institute reported your history.


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