A little-noticed bill moving through Congress would allow companies to require employees to undergo genetic testing or risk paying a penalty of thousands of dollars, and would let employers see that genetic and other health information.
Giving employers such power is now prohibited by legislation including the 2008 genetic privacy and nondiscrimination law known as GINA. The new bill gets around that landmark law by stating explicitly that GINA and other protections do not apply when genetic tests are part of a “workplace wellness” program.
The bill, H.R. 1313, was approved by a House committee on Wednesday, with all 22 Republicans supporting it and all 17 Democrats opposed.
“What this bill would do is completely take away the protections of existing laws,” said Jennifer Mathis, director of policy and legal advocacy at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, a civil rights group. In particular, privacy and other protections for genetic and health information in GINA and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act “would be pretty much eviscerated,” she said.
Talk about grabbing a person by the GINA. 20 years later, the movie GATTACA is looking less like fiction.
I can't wait to see the mental gymnastics the Reichwingers will pull out to justify this.
What possible justifiable reason is there for your company to have your genetic information, except to discriminate against you.
The bill is (supposedly) designed to allow employers to craft more effective wellness programs without running afoul of existing laws. Many wellness programs already demand that employees hand over (otherwise private) medical information and health details, this would allow them to go even further, with the pretense that it allows even more beneficial wellness programs.
I don't buy it for a second, I'll be the first conservative to say I think this is a load of crap, I completely disagree with this bill.
They don't even attempt to hide their contempt for normal people. Yeah, because their base only watches/listening to right wing propaganda they never realize it.
What possible justifiable reason is there for your company to have your genetic information, except to discriminate against you.
That's exactly the point. To make it justifiable to discriminate. We already do age discrimination in insurance pricing. Why not go the next step in premium adjustment by testing for other possible genetic defects that could cost them in the future? Have fun when your wives/daughters start getting tagged with the doomsday marker for breast cancer and either being unisurable or getting stuck with a premium that's 2x as high for the inevitable case of case they will likely get.
To my knowledge, this is actually not a way this can be used. Companies can provide you reduced premiums based on whether you participate in the wellness program or not. They can't offer you different premiums based on your specific health information, and this bill doesn't change that. In your example with breast cancer markers etc, the company would get sued into oblivion for discrimination if they did that. That's now, it could easily change in the future of course.
Technically this is small government, if its a repeal. This is all at-will employment, and you are free to work elsewhere. We are all free to buy products or use the services of companies that do not engage in such practices.
You are also free to choose marketplace plans while employed at a place that maybe wants to use genetic testing to lower their group insurance rate. The marketplace plans is the aggregate risk pool without any sort of advanced risk testing.
It's also not a bad idea to get genetic tested in the first place, why not know what your risks are so you can mitigate them as best as you can yourself? I really doubt any progressive or liberal type with their strict adherence to science and facts, would prefer to live life in complete ignorance of their own body. Ignorance is for conservatives or libertarians like myself.
Technically this is small government, if its a repeal. This is all at-will employment, and you are free to work elsewhere. We are all free to buy products or use the services of companies that do not engage in such practices.
You are also free to choose marketplace plans while employed at a place that maybe wants to use genetic testing to lower their group insurance rate. The marketplace plans is the aggregate risk pool without any sort of advanced risk testing.
It's also not a bad idea to get genetic tested in the first place, why not know what your risks are so you can mitigate them as best as you can yourself? I really doubt any progressive or liberal type with their strict adherence to science and facts, would prefer to live life in complete ignorance of their own body. Ignorance is for conservatives or libertarians like myself.
Technically this is small government, if its a repeal. This is all at-will employment, and you are free to work elsewhere. We are all free to buy products or use the services of companies that do not engage in such practices.
You are also free to choose marketplace plans while employed at a place that maybe wants to use genetic testing to lower their group insurance rate. The marketplace plans is the aggregate risk pool without any sort of advanced risk testing.
It's also not a bad idea to get genetic tested in the first place, why not know what your risks are so you can mitigate them as best as you can yourself? I really doubt any progressive or liberal type with their strict adherence to science and facts, would prefer to live life in complete ignorance of their own body. Ignorance is for conservatives or libertarians like myself.
Why, oh why, isn't there a STUPID or IGNORANT or DUMBASS button in addition to the like button? If there was a reason for it, I give you:
- a retard
I'm all for everyone getting genetic testing. In fact, I'm all for every single human submitting an individual sample for big data genome testing/human genome assembly projects--all of it being anonymized, of course, with open access to data for the individual in perpetuity, even if these are private companies handling it (e.g. 23 and me).
At the same time, this is not information that insurers should have access to (exploitation of non-determinative genetic information is a given), and certainly not information that any employer should ever have access to. I'm a geneticist by trade and have quite a bit of experience with Next Gen sequencing technology, and certainly the efficacy of this type of technology and the various uses for such data, and I'm liberal. I support this sequencing, but I also understand that this is the type of information that can and should only ever be controlled by the individual patient, to their specific end. In fact, in some cases, it could be argued that it might be unethical to inform the patient of information in their genetic testing.