ereditary bowel cancer claimed the lives of three women in Dwayne Honor’s family. They had Lynch syndrome, a genetic condition that increases the chances of certain cancers developing. But he never expected it to affect his insurance.
Paediatrician and chair of parliament’s health committee, Mike Freelander, agrees it’s a form of discrimination. The committee has recommended the insurance industry be banned from accessing people’s genetic testing results as part of a crackdown against the discriminatory use of health data.But the life insurance industry is fighting a total ban and instead wants a financial cap on insurance policies offered without disclosure.
“We really are now at a tipping point where we need to decide who should have that information, and how it should be used,” he says. The UK and Canada imposed total bans in 2001 and 2017, respectively. Under the Canadian ban, information can only be submitted voluntarily by a person seeking to prove they do not have a condition that runs in their family.
It also wants the government to maintain “the principle that insurers can ask people to disclose, and use as part of the underwriting process, any diagnosis of a condition, even if the diagnosis resulted directly or indirectly from a genetic test”.