lasher@via.DEC (Lew Lasher) (09/16/85)
In response to recent postings about insurance companies using the HTLV-III blood test as a measurement of a policyholder's risk, a still more recent posting mentioned that a certain insurance company was investigating whether prospective policyholders were *gay* as a measurement of insurance risk. Although the person who sent in the latter posting probably didn't intend to support the use of HTLV-III blood tests by insurance companies, the later article gives an argument, albeit a flawed one, *for* such use of the tests. Rather than generalizing about all gay people, the argument would go, and putting us all into a high risk (in the insurance sense) group, and conducting intrusive investigations into gay people's private lives, the HTLV-III blood tests give an objective, accurate criterion of insurance risk which does not require sending spies into people's bedrooms. The problems with this argument are (at least) that the blood tests are so inaccurate that is unfair for individuals to suffer consequences (such as being denied health insurance) and that the "objective" evidence of exposure to the HTLV-III virus is likely to be interpreted subjectively as evidence that an individual is gay. The argument is, in addition, obnoxious in trying to separate "clean gays" from "bad gays." The fundamental problem is in the use of a diagnostic test, whose purpose seems principally to protect blood transfusion recipients rather than even as a diagnostic test, as a convenience to the insurance industry. To allow insurance companies to limit their coverage in this way has such negative consequences (people with AIDS not being to able to afford treatment, and people refusing to take the HTLV-III test for fear of denial of health insurance) that insurance companies should be forbidden by law from using the test as a criterion for denying coverage.