My Genome, My Self? 194
theodp writes "After baring his DNA for the world to see, Steven Pinker follows up in the NYT Magazine with his take on the coming era of consumer genetics. Pinker comes away less wide-eyed than Time Magazine about the current predictive ability of $399 genetic tests, but is convinced enough to opt out of learning whether he has a gene that increases the risk of Alzheimer's and believes that genetic-testing-for-the-masses may hasten the arrival of national health insurance ('piecemeal insurance is not viable in a world in which insurers can cherry-pick the most risk-free customers'). Pinker believes that personal genomics is just too much fun to ban, but for now suggests: 'if you want to know whether you are at risk for high cholesterol, have your cholesterol measured; if you want to know whether you are good at math, take a math test.'"
Re:This will actually reverse the cost of health c (Score:2, Informative)
Dude, you're full of shit. $35/visit, eh? Ya. So assuming the doctor's day is full of patients (no gaps) and each "visit" is 30 minutes the doctor makes $70/hr. Now you add in business taxes and he makes ~$50/hr, maybe less. Then you factor in office space and ... oh fuck he's losing money and we haven't even factored in equipment, supplies, other staff (let's face it if his day is full of patients he's going to need at least one receptionist), etc, etc, etc.
Now as to saving for your own medical care. That's nice and all but unrealistic. For one everyone has high medical costs when they are old. But only say a quarter of the population is going to have a real need for major medical treatment before they are old. And guess what... Those who are unfortunate to need such medical treatment are likely to be needing well over $100,000 in services. The average *FAMILY'S* income in the US is what $45,000/yr. I'll let you do the math on that one.
Not the probelm (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This will actually reverse the cost of health c (Score:3, Informative)
Dude, you're full of shit. $35/visit, eh? Ya. So assuming the doctor's day is full of patients (no gaps) and each "visit" is 30 minutes the doctor makes $70/hr. Now you add in business taxes and he makes ~$50/hr, maybe less. Then you factor in office space and ... oh fuck he's losing money and we haven't even factored in equipment, supplies, other staff (let's face it if his day is full of patients he's going to need at least one receptionist), etc, etc, etc.
Google: Cash Only Doctors. It's a fact. Most doctor visits do not last long. A decent doctor can see 8 patients in an hour for the basic checkup, cold, or other minor ache or pain. I also pay an annual fee that covers joining the clinic.
Some cash-only doctors actually get tips, too. No joke. I know of 2 AAPS doctors that earn more than their annual billing. Most doctors who accept insurance earn far LESS than their annual billing because of the insurance haggling, red tape, and administrative costs.
Now as to saving for your own medical care. That's nice and all but unrealistic. For one everyone has high medical costs when they are old. But only say a quarter of the population is going to have a real need for major medical treatment before they are old. And guess what... Those who are unfortunate to need such medical treatment are likely to be needing well over $100,000 in services. The average *FAMILY'S* income in the US is what $45,000/yr. I'll let you do the math on that one.
Again, you can blame this on insurance and public health programs that drive the cost of medical services up, combined with Congress colluding with the AMA to keep the number of doctors graduating down. It's like education: when government started subsidizing school loans, the cost skyrocketed. Get government out of health care, and education, and the costs will DIVE.
If someone has a great need for medical treatment that is expensive, they use INSURANCE. I tried to find an insurance policy with a $100,000 deductible, but they don't exist. I pay, for EXCELLENT emergency treatment, about 20% of the cost of a typical smoker my age. Why? Because of my high deductible. I buy generics when I need any medication.
The more we create third parties, the more prices go up. It's a simple financial fact.
Re:I was "almost" a subject of this experiment (Score:3, Informative)
Very well, my apologies for the hostility.
I had thought that the BRCA1 Gene Patent was amended allowing other people's methods for applying the test to be used without licensing fees to be paid for Myriad?
A quick Google for the topic brings up a [phgfoundation.org] few [phgfoundation.org] articles [phgfoundation.org] dated some time ago.
Do you know what the current state of play regarding this is now?
I'm curious as I'm currently studying "Regulatory, Ethical and Legal issues in Biotechnology" in anticipation of filing a Patent for one of my own implementations of a "Special creature".
To clarify, I don't believe I should be allowed to patent a naturally-occuring sequence I discovered, however if I come up with a unique way to implement a new function in an organism I think I'm entitled to own the method via which it is done.
Re:This will actually reverse the cost of health c (Score:1, Informative)
State sponsored means, or State enforced means
It's not just "the state", insurance companies themselves are fucking with the prices. Remember, they want high prices because A) high prices scare people into thinking they need insurance and B) they dictate what they're going to pay anyway, so high prices don't affect them.
To see this in action, consider a fictitious country: some common and uncomfortable disease exists here that costs $1 to treat. A company comes along and says "For $0.90, we'll pay your treatment cost for you!" Half of the people in the country buy the insurance. The insurance company goes to the doctors and says "I have half the people in this country on my insurance plan. You'll treat them for $0.50, or I'll tell them to go to some other doctor and you get nothing." One or two like dada's doctor will say "hell no" and lose half their patients, but most will think "if half of the patients are on the insurance, I can simply charge the patients who aren't 50 cents more to make up the difference.
A year passes, and it's time for everyone to sign a new contract. The insurance company raises its rates to $1.25 and runs ads about the "recent increase in the cost of medicine". Even more people sign up. The insurance company goes to the doctors and tells them that they have 2/3rds of the patients in the country on the insurance plan, and now they're going to pay the doctor $0.30 to treat them. Some doctors drop out, the rest do the math and figure out that to make up for the money they're losing, they'll have to charge the one-in-three uninsured patient $2.40 to make up the difference.
This pattern repeats until setting a simple arm fracture costs the uninsured patient thousands of dollars for what used to be a couple hundred bucks of time and plaster. Eventually most patients are insured and fewer and fewer doctors drop out of the insurance game because they would have to fight over smaller and smaller pools of patients. The price of insurance never appears to be more than the cost of treatment, but only because the apparent cost of treatment is artificially inflated by the insurance company contracts.
Re:Add the danger off false positives... (Score:3, Informative)
[W]hat good would "normal" cancer test be if it detected 100% of cancer cases, but also, for every one detected, falsely marked 3 others as having cancer when they didn't.
We do have a lot of data on how society in general (and the corporate world in particular) deals with such data. For example, ten years ago the two most common HIV tests had 10% and 5% false-positive rates. There was a lot of PR to reassure people that this wasn't important, but the data said otherwise.
Consider the math with a simple example: You have a test population of about a million, of which roughly 1000 have HIV. The better (5%) test would show 51,000 positives, 1000 true positives and 50,000 (5% of a million) false positives.
This in itself should make you cautious. But consider how many employers and insurance companies dealt with it. They had forms that asked whether you have ever tested positive for HIV. If you were one of the 50,000 false positives, and later tests showed that you didn't have HIV, this didn't matter. There's no place on the application form for that information. For the rest of your life, you have tested positive to HIV, and to not mention this is fraud.
Actually, in most cases, the 10%-false-positive test was the first used, so 1/10 people who had that test are now and forever among the group that have tested positive for HIV. Further testing with other tests won't decrease this number; it can only increase the percentage that have tested positive. So the fact that we have better HIV tests now is mostly irrelevant to those who tested positive 10 or 20 years ago. They still have it on their medical record, and they legally have to admit it, despite the results of later tests.
Now, it's true that there are corporations that are more responsible than this. But as long as a significant portion of the corporate world treats false positives this way, the sensible approach is to avoid any tests that have a nonzero false-positive rate.
And note that I haven't mentioned the possibility of fraudulent positive test results. This is a very real worry when the legal system is involved, as with blood-alcohol and polygraph tests. Those require a different sort of defensive approach.