Thanks to Genetic Testing, Everyone Could Soon Have a Pre-Existing Condition

Which makes the AHCA’s removal of protections so much more frightening.

As currently written, the American Health Care Act allows states to opt out of the popular Obamacare provision that bans insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions. Twenty-seven percent of adult Americans under the age of 65 have a declinable pre-existing condition, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and if the AHCA becomes law, any number of them could become uninsured. The guiding GOP arithmetic takes as a given that people should pre-emptively pony up for conditions beyond their control—including, yes, having a second X chromosome. Millions more have conditions—from asthma to the ever-inconvenient urinary tract infection—that could also jack up the rate of coverage, making insurance prohibitively expensive.

What their calculations don’t yet consider are the could-be conditions embedded in our DNA. Our genomes provide a window into scores of genetic risk factors that have yet to present as full-fledged pre-existing conditions. If the GOP insists that people can be charged differently depending on their current health, what’s to say they’ll stop short of asserting...