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Google Looking To Define a Healthy Human
rtoz writes: Google's moonshot research division, "Google X," has started "Baseline Study," a project designed to collect anonymous genetic and molecular information from 175 people (and later thousands more) to create a complete picture of what a healthy human being should be. The blueprint will help researchers detect health problems such as heart disease and cancer far earlier, focusing medicine on prevention rather than treatment. According to Google, the information from Baseline will be anonymous, and its use will be limited to medical and health purposes. Data won't be shared with insurance companies.
Given the revelations from Snowden I see no reason to trust Google or any other large American company.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
Now you can target them like a laser!
The baseline healthy person is of mixed race, has 1.93 arms and 2.1 children, and is a hermaphrodite.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
"Oh that promise to not sell the information? Well, we screwed up and sold it all for $10 Billion. Pay a fine of $10 Million? Sure, that's fair."
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
...the initiative, led by Khan Noonien Singh, looks to improve the quality of life and longevity, strength, and memory for all humans, over the entire planet. On the goals of his project, Khan replied, "Improve a mechanical device and you may double productivity, but improve man and you gain a thousandfold."
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
That Google will sell this information to insurance companies who will use it to deny insurance to even more people than they already do.
Which is one reason why it is so great that it is now illegal under the ACA to deny insurance due to pre-existing conditions.
Now, at last! Google People! In cooperation with the Venter Institute.
Oh wait, it's the detestable Democrats lying. How about that? What a fucking surprise! Lying Democrats? Who could believe this?
Oh course they are trying now to say that the subsidy afforded to states to setup exchanges and withheld from those who do not was a typo. Get that? 1000s of pages and they made a typo. This of course due to a court ruling that says that those who signed up via the federal exchange cannot get subsidies because of - get this - the wording in the legislation - has to stand.
Which of course will bankrupt Obamacare in short order. But they can't have that, so you see Democrat stooges saying things like "“I was speaking off-the-cuff. It was just a mistake. People make mistakes. Congress made a mistake drafting the law and I made a mistake talking about it,” Gruber told The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn. “But there was never any intention to literally withhold money, to withhold tax credits, from the states that didn’t take that step. That’s clear in the intent of the law and if you talk to anybody who worked on the law. My subsequent statement was just a speak-o—you know, like a typo.”
http://reason.com/blog/2014/07/25/obamacare-architect-jonathan-gruber-says
And here we have the same dirtbag earlier saying;
"But I don't know that for sure. And that is really the ultimate threat, is, will people understand that, gee, if your governor doesn't set up an exchange, you're losing hundreds of millions of dollars of tax credits to be delivered to your citizens."
Does that sound like a speak-o to you? Sounds like a two faced lying looter to me.
You know damned well it isn't. These fucksticks are lying through their teeth.
But hey, who gives a fuck, the law is what the preznit says it is, he is our lord and our king! He will save us from those rich evil Republicans who seek only to make all poor people sick and die.
Right?
So who out there has even a smidgen of intellectual honesty? Lying administration. Lying cocksuckers in congress. Lying apparatchiks to the left and to the right. All designed to bring tyranny upon our land, to enslave the people and to force state run healthcare down our throats. All this for power.
You want a law? Write it to say what you want and sell that to the people honestly and with true words. That is too much to ask?
But we know what all you progressive assholes will say, anything to support the regime and to put those evil constitution loving bastards in their place.
I hate you stupid fucks more and more each day.
The state and its now satellite insurance companies, who'd love to enforce it on the rest of us.
"and now lets see which of us can touch our toes! Right over from the hips, please, comrades!"
"anyone over 45 is perfectly capable of touching his toes!"
They can't do everything, which is going to lead them to doing a lot of things suckily.
How do they actually make money to keep those bazillions of servers running? Does anyone ever actually click on those ads?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
As someone with a science background, I always find it shocking how much random guesswork goes on in medicine. You'd think that we could take a person in, take a bunch of different samples for analysis, test their DNA, run a full body scan, and just find anything that wasn't working the way it should. Ideally, I think our goal should be to be able to find illness even when the patient doesn't know it's there.
It'd be great, for example, if you could go to the doctor and get a battery of tests, and have him say, "Hey, so you've been feeling a bit tired recently, right?"
The patient says, "Yeah, I guess I haven't been sleeping well, and..."
And the doctor interrupts, "Nope. I'm pretty sure the problem is that you haven't been eating enough [whatever]. It's causing too much of [something] in your system, which is causing you to be lethargic."
I would imagine that part of the problem is that you can't establish what constitutes a problematic variance from "normal" until you establish what is an acceptable variance from "normal". You can't establish what constitutes an acceptable variance from "normal" until you have some baseline of "normal".
That Google will sell this information to insurance companies who will use it to deny affordable insurance to even more people than they already do.
FTFY.
Legally, they can't deny you coverage. What they can do is make your coverage so expensive you can't afford to actually use it.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
That Google will sell this information to insurance companies who will use it to deny insurance to even more people than they already do.
Which is one reason why it is so great that it is now illegal under the ACA to deny insurance due to pre-existing conditions.
Lol, naivete can be funny.
Sure, they can't outright deny you coverage, but what stops them from making your coverage so expensive you can't afford the deductibles? The answer is, "not a damn thing."
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Does the baseline healthy human enjoy targeted advertising, or does he really enjoy targeted advertising and find it to be an enriching aspect of his modern lifestyle?
... that is, unil the insurance companies get another fantastic handout from the federal government, this time requiring google to release the information to them so that they can raise your rates. Google has no power in comparison to the insurance industry.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Only some types of insurance. I have been denied life insurance because of a pre-existing condition, for example (putting my entire family at risk in the process).
This is entirely reasonable. Most life insurance companies require a physical exam before they'll insure you. They also keep tons of actuarial data on health risks already. Google will just be duplicating this -- and probably doing a better job of it, which will likely make it easier for people with pre-existing conditions to get life insurance, not harder.
Lol, naivete can be funny.
Sure, they can't outright deny you coverage, but what stops them from making your coverage so expensive you can't afford the deductibles? The answer is, "not a damn thing."
Which is why it's so great that the ACA has rate controls to prevent this kind of thing from happening, and mandates that everybody get insurance, so the many low-risk insured create a pool which makes it possible to cover the high-risk population in an affordable way.
The insurance companies and the subservient state
There, fixed that for 'ya. You're welcome.
The insurance industry didn't get the largest corporate handout to come from any federal government, ever by accident.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Baseline will be monitored by institutional review boards, which oversee all medical research involving humans. Once the full study gets going, boards run by the medical schools at Duke University and Stanford University will control how the information is used.
Now feel free to laugh derisively at the idiots who didn't read TFA and immediately started screeching about Google invading their privacy.
Are they going to really look at the outliers? I'm 6'6" (almost 2.0M) tall. I personally think that some of the health metrics use "average" people and assume linearity for weight, calorie consumption, etc. We need to check the extremely tall, the extremely short as well as weight variations in a large sample.
Using the Freedom of Speech while I still have it.
I'm 61 and in perfect health. Literally, perfect health. Superb lipid profile, low blood sugar, not over weight, no diseases, never smoked, don't drink, athlete level blood pressure, etc. I work my ass off keeping this way.
I WANT the damn insurance companies to discriminate on the basis of "pre existing conditions". Note that the term "pre existing conditions" is an insurance industry term, nothing to do with health care.
I damn sure don't want anyone selling any information about me and I'm sure Google will, but as I said, in an ideal world, I'd give it to the parasitic insurance industry.
No, scratch the above. In a ideal world, I wouldn't have to worry about health insurance at all. I only need some now I order to set up an HSA. And I only want to set up an HSA in order to save some money in taxes. In an ideal world, I'd just pay for my own health care and not have to screw around with government corruption and confiscatory taxes in the first place.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
According to Google, the information from Baseline will be anonymous, and its use will be limited to medical and health purposes.
I work in the medical field. Both clinical and research. I've seen what "anonymous patient" data looks like. While it can be done correctly, it almost never is. When I say almost never, I mean under 5% of the time; and that's being generous.
The DICOM data generated by most advanced imaging scanners (MRI, CT. etc) is pretty big. To make matters worse, every vendor (Philips, GE, Siemens, etc) uses more than just the standard fields (tags) to store the unique patient identifiers. They all also use proprietary or what are sometimes referred to as "shadow" or "private" tags. These tags are different for every vendor and are used in different ways. To make matters worse, these tags can change depending on the model, firmware version or even the scanning sequence used.
If you just remove just the standard patient identifying tags, you could very well miss that they were all duplicated in the private tags. If you simply remove all of the private tags, you may end up removing the very data that is needed to make sense of the images themselves. Such as how many mm a pixel is, or the volume of a voxel. This all needs to be done for every image in the exam and there can be thousands to tens of thousands of them. Most programs used to de-identify the exam either miss all of the private tags, or remove too much data and render the exams useless. So patient identifiers are left in most exams and we just try to ignore this.
The big question is, is how will a company like Google treat this unfortunate situation? Most in the medical field are there because of their compassion for their patients and do research for the betterment of the general population. What happens when executive types realize they have this kind of data?
I'll start a pool and take odds on that utopian conclusion - I'll bet against it myself.
Would you rather life insurance companies base their actuarial decisions on crystal balls or witch doctors? Personally, I wouldn't buy insurance from a company that didn't use the most accurate and complete health statistics available. Such a company would likely fold before I died and my beneficiaries could collect on the policy.
As far as insurance companies trying to find excuses to weasel out of paying claims, it's pretty fucking hard for a life insurance company to do that, no? Once you're insured, it's pretty unequivocal when you have a claim.
Lol, naivete can be funny.
Sure, they can't outright deny you coverage, but what stops them from making your coverage so expensive you can't afford the deductibles? The answer is, "not a damn thing."
Which is why it's so great that the ACA has rate controls to prevent this kind of thing from happening, and mandates that everybody get insurance, so the many low-risk insured create a pool which makes it possible to cover the high-risk population in an affordable way.
You don't really believe that, do you? There are already tons of reports rolling in of people being denied treatments, being told that the cost of a procedure wouldn't go towards their deductible, and finding out that their $150/mo insurance program has a $25,000 deductible attached to it.
Some examples:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/g...
A pastor in Iowa, who is covered under ObamaCare, decried “there’s no compassion in the Affordable Care Act,” after he was told just minutes before receiving life-saving chemo that his treatments would not be covered. The pastor’s family has since emptied their savings account and are now $50,000 in debt.
A February 4 Los Angeles Times article detailed the story of California resident Danielle Nelson who was promised by Anthem Blue cross that her oncologists would be covered in her new policy. Diagnosed with non-Hogkins lymphoma last year, a lump was found near her jaw in January. But when she went to her oncologist’s office, the Times reported she “promptly encountered a bright orange sign saying that Covered California plans are not accepted.” Nelson told the Times: “I’m a complete fan of the Affordable Care Act, but now I can’t sleep at night, I can’t imagine this is how President Obama wanted it to happen.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ob...
The Affordable Care Act is turning out to be less than affordable for some consumers.
That’s because many of the plans carry huge deductibles, creating potential financial problems for middle-class consumers. Some “bronze”-level plans, the lowest level of coverage, carry deductibles as high as $12,700 per year for a family of four... The average individual deductible for a bronze plan is a whopping $5,081 per year, according to research provided to CBS MoneyWatch from HealthPocket, a technology company that ranks health care plans.
What’s worse, that represents an increase of 40 percent from the average deductible for an individually purchased plan before the federal health care overhaul, according to The Wall Street Journal.
... and these are just the tip of the iceberg. Things will get worse as the delayed provisions start to kick in.
That said, I don't think the concept of single-payer healthcare is a bad one; however I do not believe the current implementation is an effective system that's not designed to bilk average Americans out of money for the benefit of insurance execs and the Congresscritters who love them.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You don't really believe that, do you? There are already tons of reports rolling in of people being denied treatments, being told that the cost of a procedure wouldn't go towards their deductible, and finding out that their $150/mo insurance program has a $25,000 deductible attached to it.
Which, no doubt, you believe utterly uncritically.
Unless a fat sack of cash or some sort of swanky government hand-out comes their way...
And then, what then? We have another artificial "universal" measure for determining what "healthy" is? Like BMI supposedly is for weight measurement?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I've actually bothered to do some research on the topic, read articles, had discussions with economists and healthcare professionals, talked to people, etc.
I'm guess you have not gone nearly that far.
PS I get what you're implying, and not only is it untrue, it's a weak and childish attempt to marginalize me via blatant mischaracterization of my dissent. If you have empirical evidence to support your position, present it. If all you have is your opinion, please keep it to yourself, or at the least make it clear that you are not speaking from a position of intimate knowledge.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Agree completely that people don't comprehend the ramifications of the enormous deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums in these so-called "low cost" plans. Add to that the tendency toward ultra-narrow provider networks and the resultant increase in risk of balance billing by out-of-network providers.
It's astounding to me how far people are willing to stick their heads in the sand to pretend that the current system is, in aggregate, "better" than the one that we already had.
what a lot of posters strike me as missing, is that the DEFINITION OF WHATS HEALTHY IS ALREADY MADE, and when you apply for life insurance you AGREE TO SHARE ALL DR RECORDS AND GET RETESTED. So unless most of you just take the "cover your credit card debt and handle the funeral services" health insurance your company offers, then you've already crossed the 'share lots of specific health info, tied specifically to you' threshold. As someone who's off the bell curve in terms of body height, I'd welcome a more scientific and data centric definition of stuff like BMI. what ID challenge the crypto-smart folks on /. , is to come up with a way - or promote if it's already done - to create a way to guarantee authenticity of that the data is as a patient intended to contribute, whilst cryptographically ensure that the contributor is obsfucated.
I don't think the concept of single-payer healthcare is a bad one; however I do not believe the current implementation is an effective system that's not designed to bilk average Americans out of money for the benefit of insurance execs and the Congresscritters who love them.
Glad to hear you support a single-payer system. However, the "current implementation" of the ACA is not a single-payer system. It is a government-managed marketplace, with private insurance companies providing the coverage.
If the ACA truly were a single-payer system (like Medicare is) it would be far more effective at protecting average Americans from being bilked by "insurance execs and the Congresscritters who love them."
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Oh hi there, I'm in my late 40's, but since I actually go to great pains to take care of myself, I'm not obese, weak, slow, and sickly like the average person is.. so I'm in that 'pool' you speak of, the one that 'gets' to pay for everyone else, who fucked themselves up eating crap and never moving off the goddamn couch, except to go to the refrigerator. Know what your oh-so-wonderful ACA is going to eventually do to my life? Ensure that I can't AFFORD to keep doing the things that are KEEPING ME HEALTHY, that's what. Then I'll end up fat, weak, slow, sickly, and miserable. Ain't that a hoot? I resent having to pay for healthcare for people who wouldn't NEED it if they could be bothered to take care of themselves properly.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Huh. That sounds like a good idea. Take a little from everyone and use it to benefit people as they need it. You might not need it now, but others will, and when it's your turn it'll be glad it's there.
Nah, probably too crazy to work.
Use an algorithm to determine if they stick to the 3 major food groups, caffeine, nicotine, and ibuprofen. Parse through their social media interactions to make sure they never get angry because they have killed all of their enemies. And, bot through their pr0n accounts to make sure they have sex regularly.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
But you will need it, should you be in a car wreck, fall off a bridge or cliff, or even do something as silly as slip on the sidewalk and bang your head. There's all sorts of things that might happen. Hell, you might even suffer one of the many potential massive coronary type events, including those that have nothing to do with how you live (John Ritter ring a bell?) So yes, you should pay in, or have a magnetic tattoo stamped on your forehead that you are uninsured, so when the medics arrive at the scene with your prostrate body, a quick scan will be all the time they need to determine they can leave you there for the coroner, and also bill you for the $1K+ for their trip out to read that fact. (magnetic forehead tattoo that penetrates your skull, so a mere scalping via a motorcycle wreck won't remove the ability to read said tattoo, in case any one is wondering)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Don't think we've seen one of those in a good long while. How many people reading this right now have a good diet? Do you exercise enough? How's your digestion? Immune system? Do you have any infections that won't go away/you don't know about? How's the ratio of bacteria in your intestines? Define a healthy human being.... no one knows what that is. Doctors certainly don't because there's no profit in it.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
That was sarcasm, right? Damn you, Poe's Law!
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.