Should Life Insurance Firms Have Access to Your Genetic Test Results?

So, you're thinking you might like to check out one of those inexpensive new tests that would give you some insight into, say, the health implications of your ethnic heritage. It may, incidentally, turn up findings you may or may not want -- say, on your Alzheimer's disease risk, or your risk of developing lung, breast or skin cancer.

And let's say in the next year or two that when you apply for life insurance (or long-term care or disability insurance), the insurance company demands to know whether you've had any genetic testing done, and if so, wants to see it. Or requires some genetic testing done as a condition of providing coverage.

Didn't see that coming, did you?

The insurance companies have -- and, fortunately for us, so has a group of bioethicists from Columbia University, who in a commentary in this week's Journal of the American Medical Assn. pondered the not-at-all distant future in which insurers will seek access to applicants' genetic test findings before making their underwriting decisions.

Now that it can cost as little as $1,000...