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:Isn't it, though? (Score:5, Insightful)
Health insurance is a way of sharing risk, a form of solidarity. It is based on the insight that nobody is at fault for certain ailments, so in a society which wants to give the same basic opportunities to everybody, it is our duty to help those who, through no fault of their own, are burdened with sickness or injury. Making people with unfavorable genetic dispositions pay a higher price for health insurance is the opposite of the purpose of health insurance.
Id venture (Score:5, Insightful)
That this article will be tagged GATTACA.
All reasons aside, if you get a genetic test right now, you're screwed. Why?
There is no genetic rights. Businesses can exclude you from working for them due to it. Health insurance can disclaim all the "bad gene" illnesses, that is if they accept you at all. The government can pidgeonhole you in some god-awful plan in which you cannot escape.
And if you hide the fact that you were tested, or hide the test results, you are committing insurance fraud, or can be dismissed, with prejudice, for withholding vital employer facts.
And you thought poppy roll buns and drug tests were bad...
Re:Isn't it, though? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, health insurance as a business model is viable when businessmen can eliminate risk from the insured pool. It just isn't viable as a way to care for a society. I think that's the point that was being made. Costs are distrubuted in insurance because you get a very wide pool of people involved, and everybody pays in. OTOH, if you get genetic segregation of health insurance plans, you have only very risky people in a particular pool, and they all have to pay very high rates. If they can't afford that, then you wind up with a bunch of people dead, which is a higher cost to society than a few extra dollars for insurance.
I agree that most people aren't interested in "health insurance." People want health. Health care, medical care, to be healthy. Health insurance is just a particular way to try and reduce the potentially extreme personal costs of getting health. And, once you get a completely nationalised health system, you effectively have a system equivalent to insurance with the largest possible pool. You pay taxes instead of premiums, but the risk is distributed through the entire society, so the people with the lowest risk probably pay slightly more as tax, but the people with the highest risk pay substantially less. (Of course, that assumes that the *for profit* health insurance companies don't actually make a profit any higher that the cost of government stupidity, while in practice the profits of doing health insurance tend to be enormous. This is likely an invalid assumption, no matter how cockheaded the government implementation is.)
Re:Isn't it, though? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps what you said is true for a co-op, in which everybody in the co-op does for each other.
However, if we talk about the USA Medical Insurance companies, they exist for pure profit and nothing else. If they fail to treat you within the allotted time, you die. Shucks... guess we keep your money you paid for insurance services.
Re:Isn't it, though? (Score:4, Insightful)
In theory insurance is about customers sharing the burden of risk, not insurance companies raising their profits by mitigating risk. In practice, it's exactly the opposite.
Re:Isn't it, though? (Score:1, Insightful)
Socialism is the concept that the means of production are owned and controlled by the state (communism: by the people). Solidarity is the individual or collective desire to help someone with their problems. The concepts couldn't be more different.
Health insurance is a result of solidarity insofar as the sick and injured couldn't institute and sustain a health insurance system on their own. The system depends on people with good health mixing their low risk with the high risk of other people. If you separate the low risk people from the high risk people, health insurance can no longer serve its primary function.
Re:Isn't it, though? (Score:4, Insightful)
Insurance, after all, is about mitigating risk, and a fuller knowledge of one's exposure to risk is a good thing.
MEDICAL insurance is, to most people, actually all about being able to afford medical treatment. Knowing your "risk" in this situation unfortunately can often only lead to you being denied coverage and subsequently NOT afford the services you need more.
Re:Isn't it, though? (Score:4, Insightful)
It is, however, some expression of socialism.
Now that the Republican Party is passing out of power in the US we can expect that there will be a good deal less socialism, so whether or not it is desirable (I believe mostly not) there is going to be a good deal less of it now that the more liberal Democratic Party is in control.
I've never been clear exactly WHY Americans call their Socialist Party "the Republican Party". This is the party that has overseen massive growth in government both in responsibilities and costs, intrusive imposition of the federal government into areas normally reserved for the states or the people, and huge transfers of risk "in solidarity" from private individuals and organizations to the public.
It has capped all of this by actually taking ownership of significant parts of your financial system, which must in today's world be counted as firmly amongst "the means of production." Now that the liberal Democratic Party is replacing the socialist Republican party perhaps free market solutions will be prescribed for some of the things that ails the US, like allowing badly-run businesses that make products no one wants to FAIL.
This will actually reverse the cost of health care (Score:3, Insightful)
Health insurance is a scam pushed on the masses through Federal tax loopholes. You don't need health insurance for MOST of your health care needs. I have health insurance for BIG stuff, hence me HUGE deductible (5 figures). I pay very little for health care, going to a cash-only doctor who asks for an up front fee annually for unlimited visits and some basic yearly lab tests. He doesn't even take insurance, Medicare, or credit cards. He's also available for house calls.
Genetic testing for predispositions will likely give people options to fight the parts of those possible diseases that nurture (lifestyle) causes, instead of just pure nature (genetics). As more people are prediagnosed, it is wise for insurers to drop them. Here's the thing, though: if insurers drop too many peoole, doctors will have to find ways to treat them, or the doctors will be out of work.
The number of doctors leaving the world of insurance and Medicare are growing. It's a good thing. They can treat you cheaply ($35 per visit, cash on the barrel), and can spend time with you helping you make choices to work towards a healthier life. It's not about taking drugs, sometimes, it's about fighting the diseases before they're serious. MANY diabetics could have prevented the disease had they known they had a predisposition. Not all, I understand, but many (see: fat diabetics). The same is true of other diseases.
As more people lose health insurance and find options for cheaper health care (it is out there, really), genetic testing will make it easier for us to work with our doctors to find ways to avoid the tragedies. We're not healthy people, because we rely on health insurance rather than preliminary lifestyle adjustments before we get sick.
Wash your hands after touching sick people. Cut back on excessive drinking and smoking. Wear a condom. Don't eat too many sugars or starches. Do some exercise. It's not so hard.
The big late-age diseases, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, are great to diagnose risks early. Then you can SAVE YOUR MONEY when you're young to prepare for the care you'll need when you're old. Don't pass it off to insurers, save for it yourself.
Or are you too busy buying the latest video games or blowing it on a weekend of drinking that you won't remember in 6 months?
Re:Isn't it, though? (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing is, you seem to parse the words and glean some meaning, but the thing is, you miss the point entirely.
Not entirely unlike human genomic research :)
Re:Isn't it, though? (Score:5, Insightful)
And, once you get a completely nationalised health system, you effectively have a system equivalent to insurance with the largest possible pool.
Actually, no, because there is virtually no risk involved: EVERYONE gets sick, and EVERYONE dies, and about half of EVERYONE's health care costs come in the last six months of life.
Although costs vary, they don't vary by that much, although the tail of the distribution is long. See figure B1 in this report on Canadian health care costs to see the actual distribution [secure.cihi.ca]. For something over 70% of the population the average cost of a single hospital stay is less than $10,000, and virtually everyone has a couple of those stays in their lifetime (I've had one despite being in extremely good health generally.)
This is utterly unlike true insurance models--auto, home and term life--where the majority of people who pay premiums never collect a claim.
It is interesting to note that both the Canadian and American health care systems use insurance models, and suffer from similar problems of access and spiralling costs. I believe this is due to the inherent inappropriateness of an insurance model for a service that everyone will need and everyone which has a relatively low variance of total payouts.
A reasonable model of health insurance would deal with catastrophic costs only, say in excess of $10,000 per hospital stay as indicated by these data. As not everyone falls into that category, one could actually use insurance to spread RISK, which is not really possible under an "everyone pays, everyone benefits" model because the tails are not that relevant to the overall cost of the system, so you basically have a situation where there is very little risk to be spread (closer analysis of the numbers could contradict that, but that's my impression from a first look.)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what abortions are for ... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can test "in utero", you can have your cake and eat it too. If the fetus is going to result in a disaster, a quick D&C is preferable to a lifetime of crap.
Of course, this has social implications - the biggest one being that, over time, the average "genetic quality" of "true believers" - fundies who are against abortion, will trend lower than the population at large. Considering some of the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging moronics displayed in the last election, we've already gotten to the point where the effect is visible.
3-4 more generations ... it'll sort itself out. Just keep telling yourselves that God really wants you to breed kids that will live a shortened, painful, and meainingless life. Stupidity, like intelligence, is partly genetic.
Re:That's what abortions are for ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm an atheist - I have no religious beliefs, you ignorant clod! :-)
Look, there's no proof whatsoever that there's a "person" in a 12-week fetus, so anyone arguing against abortion based on "it's a person" is making an argument based on wishful thinking, not the evidence.
So, tell us how you can justify people having kids that are going to have a grossly shortened, painful, and ultimately tragic life. My position on abortion is based on simple decency - I wouldn't let a dog go through what some parents put kids through by not aborting when they had plenty of time.
Same as euthenasia - I'm all for it. Why should people have to continue to suffer in pain because of someone else's religious beliefs? Anyone who put an animal through such crap would be stoned to death in a show of public outrage. But for people, "It's different - it's God's will!" Bullshit. If "God" wants people to suffer, I'd rather be in hell than sit at the same table as such an asshole. Let "God" clean up "his" act first, and get a decent set of morals and ethics.
But keep breeding those mouth-breeders - the RNC needs them. Just remember that every fetus that should have been aborted that wasn't potentially takes the place of one who could have been viable.
Re:That's what abortions are for ... (Score:2, Insightful)
So you're okay with a parents' "right" to knowingly have another human being suffer for years and then die? That's just fucked up thinking from the time when kids (and wives) were regarded as property. We may not have ALL the information, but we have enough to make reasonable choices. People who knowingly bring guaranteed-risk pregnancies to term should have their tubes tied, and the fetus aborted on birth if it's been allowed to get that far. Maybe we could extend it further ... here's a thought - we could start with Sarah Palin, the "poster child" for "people - even children - should have children".
Simple - if the parents abort the defective one, they can try again, and maybe the next mix of genes will be better. After all, a lot of the genetic disorders are 50-50.
Also, it's a lot cheaper on the medical system to get an abortion than it is to finance the care cost of the seriously non-viable - not to mention the additional psychological and time burdens on the parents, which also ends up costing in lost time and $$$.
Why - any talk of making the results of genetic screening available to insurance companies ultimately comes down to $$$ - and euthanasia saves money and resources. If genetic screening shows that the treatment options available won't work, you better believe that this info will be used to deny treatment, so you might as well at least be humane and not let people needlessly suffer when they don't have other options.
We're already a few billion over capacity. If we're going to have to limit the number of births anyway, might as well make sure that they're the best possible. The alternative is NOT to limit births and get down to some sustainable level of population, in which case the eventual culling (either human or natural disaster) will be much harsher, and the "defectives" won't have a chance anyway.
It's not eugenics. It's reality. We've over-bred, and the last thing we need is to preserve defective genes that are going to hinder our chances of long-term survival. One viable child per couple for the next 100 years, no exceptions, should do it. Either we make the choice voluntarily, it it WILL be made for us.
Re:Isn't it, though? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, what's the big deal about Insurance companies making a profit. Immoral yes, but also to be expected.
It's a violation of human rights when they have a monopoly on medical care. We have a right to "life". Even felons are entitled to medical care, but not free people without coverage, and no-one is obligated to cover you, but for most health issues noone will treat you in the US without coverage. Catch-22.
If you don't believe they have a monopoly, perform this experiment: write out a bogus identity on a sheet of paper. Then dial every dentist in your area and try to get an appointment to get an infected tooth extracted sometime in the next six months, but lie and tell them you have no coverage. The result will be instructive. An infected tooth is a life threatening situation you can't get treated in an Emergency room. I know - I've tried.
We need to break the monopoly on coverage for care if we are to have a chance at a humane system.
Re:That's what abortions are for ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? Look at all the wars throughout recorded human history. One bunch of retards fighting another because "God told them to." We don't need any more of that shit, and the quicker we purge it from the gene pool, the better. If someone claimed to hear God telling them to steal cars for Jesus, we'd refuse to give it any credence. If someone claimed to hear God telling them to rape people, we'd refuse to believe it (though the people in the Bible acted on exactly that "command from god" when they'd rape the women after killing the men). If someone claimed to hear God tell them that it was their duty to shit on your living room carpet every morning at 7AM, you'd kick their ass.
So why would be believe them because they say "You must kill these people!" Simple - it aligns with the mob's secret desire to violence - not any rational thought process. Same as the rabid death penalty supporters who can't wait to execute an 8-year-old [americanchronicle.com]. Better yet, read some of the comments here [yahoo.com] and here [scaredmonkeys.com].
"God says put them to death!" Yeah, riiiiight. Got any witnesses to that? No? Just a voice in your head? God sent me an email saying you should give me all your money. And that abortion is okay. What, you don't believe me? Send an email to god AT trolltalk DOT com asking if it's true.