Taking an Ancestry Test Could Make It Harder to Buy Life Insurance
(US perspective) I&#x27;ve wondered if for-profit insurance as we know it can survive changes in advances in actuarial science &amp; related fields.<p>As I understand it, the entire concept of insurance is based around gathering relatively large groups of people with a solid understanding of their <i>average</i> risks for certain types of loss. Given the averages hold accurate over time, those that need a payout can get one, and the insurance company makes money in aggregate.<p>However, the better the insurance companies can understand our risk profiles as <i>individuals</i> (going well beyond age&#x2F;sex&#x2F;smoking&#x2F;etc&#x2F;etc&#x2F;etc) - eventually (in theory) a motivated insurance company is going to be able to determine that I have a 90% chance of developing Serious Syndrome X while you have a 97% chance of developing Minor Issue Y.<p>Today we might get put into the risk pool. But as the science advances, the risk pools can be cut into finer and finer (and more accurate) risk pools. Why should a profit-seeking insurance company insure me past some point when the data strongly indicates i&#x27;m going to need drastic and expensive intervention.<p>It seems like the three ways to avoid this are:
1. &quot;Advances&quot; like the one mentioned here don&#x27;t turn out to have enough predictive power and insurance continues to operate much as before
2. Some people just can&#x27;t get for-profit insurance, at least not for health coverage (I&#x27;d think accidents will always remain much harder to predict than e.g. heart disease). Pushing them into some kind of not-for-profit 
3. Regulation forces blinders on to underwriters essentially saying &quot;actuarial science advances to here and no further&quot;