An Illinois appeals court shut down a proposed class action that accused State Farm Life Insurance Co. of violating the state’s genetic information privacy law through its underwriting practices. The ruling turned on statutory definitions and on who, exactly, the law regulates.
A policyholder brought the case after State Farm required a physical exam and health data linked to genetic traits before issuing a life policy.
The plaintiff said that crossed a line under the Illinois Genetic Information Privacy Act, which restricts insurers from using or disclosing protected health information that includes genetic data for underwriting.
According to InsuranceNews US, State Farm pushed back with a narrower reading. The company said the underwriting limits in the statute apply to health insurers only, not life insurers. The Appellate Court of Illinois, Second District, agreed with that view.
The court accepted that the data collected during underwriting qualified as genetic information under the statute. That point didn’t decide the case.
To trigger the law’s protections, the information also had to meet the definition of personal health information, a definition the statute borrows directly from federal HIPAA standards.
Under HIPAA, personal health information must be individually identifiable and created or received by a health care provider, health plan, employer, or health care clearinghouse.
They also failed to show that ExamOne, the third party that gathered the underwriting data, qualified as a health care provider under HIPAA. Without that connection, the court said, State Farm never possessed protected health information as the law defines it.
The plaintiffs argued for a broader interpretation.
They said the statute’s opening language reaches all insurers because it doesn’t explicitly exclude life insurance, and that the underwriting limits appear later without tight boundaries.
The court rejected that approach. According to InsuranceNews US, the underwriting subsection relies on terminology tied to health insurance and includes no language that pulls life insurance into scope.
Judges also pointed to later amendments that tracked federal rules applying only to health insurers.
The opinion acknowledged the statute could use cleaner drafting. Still, when read as a whole, its structure, language, and legislative record showed lawmakers meant the underwriting ban to cover health insurers alone.
State Farm welcomed the decision, saying the court read the law as written. The American Council of Life Insurers backed that position in an amicus brief, arguing that recent lawsuits have tried to stretch the genetic privacy statute to attack long-standing life insurance underwriting practices.
