A SURVEY OF MEDICAL DIRECTORS OF LIFE-INSURANCE COMPANIES CONCERNING USE OF GENETIC INFORMATION

Rapid advances in our ability to test persons presymptomatically for g enetic diseases have generated increasing concern that genetic informa tion will be abused by insurance companies. Reasoning that the insuran ce companies may have the strongest interest in using genetic data and that the medical directors of those companies with responsibility for rating applicants would be a good source of information on the use of such data, we conducted a large survey of medical directors of North American life insurance companies. We receive responses from 27 medica l directors. Our results suggest that (1) few insurers perform genetic tests on applicants, but most are interested in accessing genetic tes t information about applicants that already exists; (2) the degree of insurers' interest in using genetic test results may depend on the fac e amount of the policy applied for an on the specificity and sensitivi ty of the test; (3) many companies employ underwriting guidelines with respect to certain genetic conditions but may not always have specifi c actuarial data in house to support their rating decisions; (4) a con siderable degree of subjectivity is involved in most insurers' rating decisions; and (5) some of the medical directors who responded to our survey are not fully informed about certain basic principles of medica l genetics.