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US Senate Backs Genetic Privacy
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at NYTimes.com (free registration required), the US Senate has unanimously voted for the first Genetic Privacy Bill. Basically, this would make it illegal for employers and insurers to deny employment or benefits based on genetic analysis of your DNA. While it still needs to be passed by the House, it seems that we're not heading towards a Gattaca-esque society, after all. Hooray for us genetically inferior invalids!"
This bill would require that you prove that the insurance company denied you coverage because of your DNA rather than some other reason of their choosing. It doesn't deny them the ability to see or maintain records of your DNA which is what we really need.
With this bill it would be no problem for an insurance company to deny you coverage based on your DNA but, tell you it is due to them having reached their quota for your age/gender/geographic region/past claims.
The law needs to say that they cannot see your genome and they definitely cannot record it. There is no reason for anyone but your doctor and his lab to have it.
Basically, this would make it illegal for employers and insurers to deny employment or benefits based on genetic analysis of your DNA.
So, it was illegal in Gattaca too. Hawke narrated something along the lines of "A perfectly innocent drug test could quickly turn into a peek at your genetic code."
Beware the loopholes.
Except the article forgot one thing: A person can't choose its own genetic markup once it is born. Seriously, how many people have 'perfect genes'? If you are less than that of the 'perfection', or if your DNA gets 'obsoleted' after a few years, should you be thrown away like some old computer trash?
The scenario you proposed only works if genetic predispositions and their expressions can be upgraded well within one's lifetime and at costs affordable to most, punishing people for the 'mistakes' made by their parents only create more problems than genetic discriminations can solve. Equal rights mean nothing if we keep on promoting systems that promote unequal rights.
actually insurance is sort of like a private socialization of society.
i.e. think.. insurance is a *business* that makes a LOT of money.. The idea that sick people should not be allowed to get insurance, or that insurance is not allowed for someone with a genetic defect (proven through DNA testing) is absurd.
Otherwise, you will have insurance companies that simple select the people they know will not ever get sick and reject all the rest. This makes them money, profit being the bottom line.
Now, on some levels this could be great (i.e. weeding out inferior gene stock etc..) however we would be drastically reducing our labor market.. So, who is going to empty your trashcan and "biggie-size" that for you?
The point is, our government won't do national healthcare even when Canada of all places has that, so we are stuck making do with insurance companies, and that has to cater to the lowest common denominator..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Who gives a damn about economics? So that the rich genetically "inferior" individuals will be able to afford health insurance and the poor won't? Kinda like what we have now (particularly here in the U.S.)? The problem with free market solutions is that in the end they boil down your worthiness and value to on thing: the size of your bank account. I'm sorry, but I refuse to agree the Bill Gates and his ilk are really more valuable to society than the millions of people who actually do the work that make them rich, and when it comes to something as fundamental as health care, socializing the costs (oh no, I said the 'S' word!) is probably the fairest solution you're going to develop to insure some semblance of equal access to all.
Furthermore, given that as the article states (as if you had actually read it) many of the genetic predispositions will amount to ABSOLUTELY NOTHING as the individual in question may not ever even develop the disorder or by diagnosing it earlier can take action to decrease the chances of developing it, it seems it would be rather unfair to discriminate on the basis of his/her genome.
Of course, what do free-marketeers really care about fairness...
fuck you.
The problem is that for a significant portion of the population, individual insurance is useless because it is easy to determine that they are or are likely unhealthy enough so that unaffordable premiums are necessary. In fact, almost everybody will be eventually be in this boat as they get older. (Oh wait... they might not. We've already completely socialized healthcare for old people. It's just that the young people who pay for their care don't get to join in on the benefits paid for by our payroll taxes.)
Individual insurance can't cover the needs of many people, so most rely on "group insurance". This isn't really insurance, though, because the providers aren't doing the homework to see who's a risk an who's not. They just close their eyes and accept the whole group. Kind of like a mini corporate-sponsored commune.
For some unknown reason, everybody seems to think that all of the people who happen to work for one employer makes a natural "group" to do this blind communal risk sharing. That doesn't change the fact that some people are sicker and are "freeloading", as you put it, off of the others in that group. Why is that any more fair than any other manipulation of "insurance" rates?
IMO, most everybody who wants health coverage would agree to sign into one universal risk pool over the span of their lifetime in return for an end to the stress over being kicked out of the system if they change employers after they or one of their dependents get sick. Sure, a young healthy person might pay a little more up front, but the unpredictability of the current system would be erased. And someday the currently healthy person is most likely going to get back what they put in to the pool.
As handily pointed out in Gattaca, where this law was in place, there are other ways around it. Just like in California where I cannot fire you because you are a single mother black lesbian jew with a physical handicap, but I CAN fire you because you are one of the above who happens to wear really ugly shoes that I can only rid myself of by firing you.
Admittedly, there may be one or two rare cases where someone writes on the pink slip: "you, single mother black lesbian jew with a predisposition for diabetes, are fired." Since most people exclude the portion between the commas, resorting to the more de riguer "you're just fired" these laws are pointless. Proving that you were fired for a specific reason when from all appearances you were fired for no reason at all is for all reasonable purposes impossible.
"Smashing, yay capitalism." -- Austin Powers