"We don't yet know which child will be born w/ some terrible afflection so sharing risk is inderstandable."
That 'truth' is rapidly vanishing. I don't know if semiconductors still obey 'Moore's Law' with but bioinformatics, the granularity of the data, the cost of the data, the ease and speed of the data and the cost of the infrastructure all are changing exponentially.
We are comfortable in the area of being able to do a complete individual genome for $1000. $100 is on the very near horizon. The current physical-exam/workup for life insurance for a middle aged male likely exceeds that considerably. The lipid panel, CBC, normal poke and prod by a professional.
What you speak of is heading towards a pin-prick of blood from every newborn, a complete genome analysis, and risk profiling before the new human is a week old. Moreover, as the genomes become increasingly available the database grows and with it the ability to assign outcome probabilities at the individual level for traits that had long been much too complex to define (multi-gene traits with mixed dominance and a touch of epigenetic maternal imprinting just to keep it interesting).
This capacity is not sci-fi. It is here, now. We must decide soon whether an individuals costs for access to medical care is to be determined at birth, or not. Gender is just the stone-age observable manifestation of that, but it is/can/will go much deeper.
And finally, as a mater of logic, you support covering pre-existing conditions, certainly gender is pre-existing.
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