Future Gattaca stopped
April 27, 2008 4:56 AM Subscribe
no Gattaca originally found on Linkfilter
Wanted to know who were the Representatives who voted against this?
Jeff Flake (R-AZ)
Edward Royce (R-CA)
and the icing on the cake:
Ron Paul (R-TX)
Be sure to write this reps and ask why they voted against this.
Wanted to know who were the Representatives who voted against this?
Jeff Flake (R-AZ)
Edward Royce (R-CA)
and the icing on the cake:
Ron Paul (R-TX)
Be sure to write this reps and ask why they voted against this.
This post was deleted for the following reason: this is not a good use of the front page of the blue. -- jessamyn
good news, eh?
posted by Dillonlikescookies at 5:08 AM on April 27, 2008
posted by Dillonlikescookies at 5:08 AM on April 27, 2008
Be sure to write this reps and ask why they voted against this.
Well, I'd imagine it's because Flake and Paul are crazy. Straight up insane. And the other guy,
I've never heard of.
Also, it's worth noting that in Gattaca, it's specifically mentioned that genetic discrimination is illegal but that everyone does it anyway.
posted by awesomebrad at 5:36 AM on April 27, 2008
Well, I'd imagine it's because Flake and Paul are crazy. Straight up insane. And the other guy,
I've never heard of.
Also, it's worth noting that in Gattaca, it's specifically mentioned that genetic discrimination is illegal but that everyone does it anyway.
posted by awesomebrad at 5:36 AM on April 27, 2008
Ron Paul is in favor of genetic testing not because he is "straight up insane," but rather because he knows that if we would genetically test him, it would reveal that he is, genetically, the only real Republican in this race.
And that he's allergic to raising taxes.
posted by Pants! at 5:53 AM on April 27, 2008
And that he's allergic to raising taxes.
posted by Pants! at 5:53 AM on April 27, 2008
Don't celebrate yet. It's not law until it passes conference and is signed by Bush. In the last session, a similar bill passed both houses by similar majorities, and then died in conference.
It's a bill we need, because this sort of genetic testing is going to become widespread -- esp. with our corporate medical insurance system. To wear the other hat, the best thing they can do to keep costs down is to test everyone, and refuse to cover those who are genetically predisposed to conditions requiring significant care.
posted by eriko at 5:59 AM on April 27, 2008
It's a bill we need, because this sort of genetic testing is going to become widespread -- esp. with our corporate medical insurance system. To wear the other hat, the best thing they can do to keep costs down is to test everyone, and refuse to cover those who are genetically predisposed to conditions requiring significant care.
posted by eriko at 5:59 AM on April 27, 2008
Amusing in light of the Supreme Courts ruling on gender discrimination in pay. Why bother with DNA when you can just discriminate based on phenotype? Get away with it for 6 months and you are in the clear forever! Wheeeeee!
posted by srboisvert at 6:14 AM on April 27, 2008
posted by srboisvert at 6:14 AM on April 27, 2008
RE: the no votes, might want to look for others who have articulated concerns. Ronald Bailey (from libertarian mag Reason) considers how such a bill might ruin the health insurance system:
"In essence, genetic privacy laws allow high-risk insurees to lie about their health in order to get more money. This means that healthier customers will have to be charged more to pay for their high-risk counterparts. This situation can set off an adverse selection spiral in which low-risk clients flee the higher premiums and high-risk clients flock to buy the insurance. As premiums rise to cover the unhealthy clients, fewer and fewer people can afford insurance."
He talks about a possible solution here.
posted by dgaicun at 6:26 AM on April 27, 2008
"In essence, genetic privacy laws allow high-risk insurees to lie about their health in order to get more money. This means that healthier customers will have to be charged more to pay for their high-risk counterparts. This situation can set off an adverse selection spiral in which low-risk clients flee the higher premiums and high-risk clients flock to buy the insurance. As premiums rise to cover the unhealthy clients, fewer and fewer people can afford insurance."
He talks about a possible solution here.
posted by dgaicun at 6:26 AM on April 27, 2008
Genetic discrimination will be the next music file sharing, for corporations.
No, wait, I'm not utterly mad (not about this, anyway). Genetic analysis is getting cheaper and cheaper (one group is aiming for $100/person in the next few years). Nabbing a sample of someone's DNA and testing it for various markers will become technically quite easy. Within, say, twenty years, unless all of the markers are tied up in some kind of patented database, the Gattaca vision of yoinking some spare bit of skin or follicle-tipped hair and then finding all about someone will be attractively easy to do and cheap to perform. Yes, so far facts cannot be patented, but weirdly we can patent already-existing genes, and the people who want things like patentable databases of facts (even if they are of genes) have a great deal of money to hire lawyers, and the people who are rightly terrified of it have no lobbyists to speak of.
Much of the defense of file sharing, for whatever reason, seems to be along the lines of "information wants to be free" (note that the second half is never quoted). The translation is that giving your buddies (or strangers) music is so damn easy to do, it ought to be legal. It's just a few clicks. And now that folks are trading FLACs, the defense of "well, it doesn't sound as good, so I don't need to feel bad about doing it" is gone.
Technology, which has a trend of making widely-adopted services and gizmos cheap to afford and easy to use, will be assaulting this and other privacy concerns. Imagine $200 Terahertz scanners that can see easily through walls. Let's watch the neighbors get it on. Well, they're just letting those photons stream right out of their house, so it's fair game. Don't like it, I suggest you put up some large copper plates in the bedroom. (To be fair, by the time this rolls around, Americans may be plugging their scanners into the failing solar array on the roof after scavenging for unwanted cans of food in the gutted supermarkets.)
Simply because something is possible, and even easy, does not imply that rights which previously existed have suddenly evaporated. Not only will we have a tough time getting that through people's heads, I predict that bills such as this need to come with numerous and deadly fangs for corporate entities and other organizations. If a company is caught at it, the penalty should be something in the order of the amount they were trying to, say, save on insurance, multiplied by the number of all of the employees since the technology was available, multiplied by the "how often do companies get away with it factor?" which will probably be something like 99 times out of 100. Build the penalty such that the market takes care of it - gambling on violating this law (and, well, most of them) needs to have an expectation value that it will cost a corporation so much money that it's simply not worth any kind of gamble at all. I actually think this should apply to many corporate penalties, but this is fresh territory and would be perhaps less difficult to pass here.
Imagine that a genetic equivalent of a third party "trust" service, like Equifax, will arise. It'll be a blacklist of one kind or another. "Well, he's not at much of a risk for a heart attack, but there are some markers for early-onset Alzheimer's and he's over forty." "Oooh, look at all of those factors for breast cancer, we can't really have employees just disappearing for double mastectomies, can we?" Corporations which are ever caught using these services should also receive the kind of penalties that make even the most psychopathic of CEOs tremble.
I'm harsh on the corporate issue because corporations cannot be jailed for their actions, the fines are rarely proportionate to the rewards they have gained for whatever nefarious activity, are not often caught doing something wrong, love to receive the profits as a group but apportion risk out to just one "bad apple" whenever they can (hey, let's pin the blame on this guy with a drinking problem) and, finally everyone seems to think that we shouldn't touch them, or we won't get all of the magic money that trickles down from the sky.
And screw the insurance companies, who look for ever-more-clever ways to screw us. Wasn't it recently demonstrated that the rise in insurance premiums more closely tracked the bad investments made by insurance companies (who then had to hike rates to make sure their profit margin remained the same) rather than the on-site costs?
posted by adipocere at 6:30 AM on April 27, 2008 [1 favorite]
No, wait, I'm not utterly mad (not about this, anyway). Genetic analysis is getting cheaper and cheaper (one group is aiming for $100/person in the next few years). Nabbing a sample of someone's DNA and testing it for various markers will become technically quite easy. Within, say, twenty years, unless all of the markers are tied up in some kind of patented database, the Gattaca vision of yoinking some spare bit of skin or follicle-tipped hair and then finding all about someone will be attractively easy to do and cheap to perform. Yes, so far facts cannot be patented, but weirdly we can patent already-existing genes, and the people who want things like patentable databases of facts (even if they are of genes) have a great deal of money to hire lawyers, and the people who are rightly terrified of it have no lobbyists to speak of.
Much of the defense of file sharing, for whatever reason, seems to be along the lines of "information wants to be free" (note that the second half is never quoted). The translation is that giving your buddies (or strangers) music is so damn easy to do, it ought to be legal. It's just a few clicks. And now that folks are trading FLACs, the defense of "well, it doesn't sound as good, so I don't need to feel bad about doing it" is gone.
Technology, which has a trend of making widely-adopted services and gizmos cheap to afford and easy to use, will be assaulting this and other privacy concerns. Imagine $200 Terahertz scanners that can see easily through walls. Let's watch the neighbors get it on. Well, they're just letting those photons stream right out of their house, so it's fair game. Don't like it, I suggest you put up some large copper plates in the bedroom. (To be fair, by the time this rolls around, Americans may be plugging their scanners into the failing solar array on the roof after scavenging for unwanted cans of food in the gutted supermarkets.)
Simply because something is possible, and even easy, does not imply that rights which previously existed have suddenly evaporated. Not only will we have a tough time getting that through people's heads, I predict that bills such as this need to come with numerous and deadly fangs for corporate entities and other organizations. If a company is caught at it, the penalty should be something in the order of the amount they were trying to, say, save on insurance, multiplied by the number of all of the employees since the technology was available, multiplied by the "how often do companies get away with it factor?" which will probably be something like 99 times out of 100. Build the penalty such that the market takes care of it - gambling on violating this law (and, well, most of them) needs to have an expectation value that it will cost a corporation so much money that it's simply not worth any kind of gamble at all. I actually think this should apply to many corporate penalties, but this is fresh territory and would be perhaps less difficult to pass here.
Imagine that a genetic equivalent of a third party "trust" service, like Equifax, will arise. It'll be a blacklist of one kind or another. "Well, he's not at much of a risk for a heart attack, but there are some markers for early-onset Alzheimer's and he's over forty." "Oooh, look at all of those factors for breast cancer, we can't really have employees just disappearing for double mastectomies, can we?" Corporations which are ever caught using these services should also receive the kind of penalties that make even the most psychopathic of CEOs tremble.
I'm harsh on the corporate issue because corporations cannot be jailed for their actions, the fines are rarely proportionate to the rewards they have gained for whatever nefarious activity, are not often caught doing something wrong, love to receive the profits as a group but apportion risk out to just one "bad apple" whenever they can (hey, let's pin the blame on this guy with a drinking problem) and, finally everyone seems to think that we shouldn't touch them, or we won't get all of the magic money that trickles down from the sky.
And screw the insurance companies, who look for ever-more-clever ways to screw us. Wasn't it recently demonstrated that the rise in insurance premiums more closely tracked the bad investments made by insurance companies (who then had to hike rates to make sure their profit margin remained the same) rather than the on-site costs?
posted by adipocere at 6:30 AM on April 27, 2008 [1 favorite]
This means that healthier customers will have to be charged more to pay for their high-risk counterparts.
Just that this is, you know, the basic principle of health insurance in the first place. Or any insurance, for that matter.
posted by uncle harold at 6:32 AM on April 27, 2008 [1 favorite]
Just that this is, you know, the basic principle of health insurance in the first place. Or any insurance, for that matter.
posted by uncle harold at 6:32 AM on April 27, 2008 [1 favorite]
His solution:
However, one possible solution to this conundrum is a type of insurance in which rates are set on the basis of age-classes. Basically people sign up when they are young and rates are evened out somewhat over their lifespans. I believe that this is how health insurance works in Switzerland and Germany now.
Uh, we're basically doing that. The young and old pay the same, but since the young are generally healthier, they're subsidizing the old.
posted by dw at 6:36 AM on April 27, 2008
However, one possible solution to this conundrum is a type of insurance in which rates are set on the basis of age-classes. Basically people sign up when they are young and rates are evened out somewhat over their lifespans. I believe that this is how health insurance works in Switzerland and Germany now.
Uh, we're basically doing that. The young and old pay the same, but since the young are generally healthier, they're subsidizing the old.
posted by dw at 6:36 AM on April 27, 2008
Ron Paul is ultimately against regulation. Drug laws? Don't need them. If you don't like them don't partake. Foreign peacekeeping or 'peacekeeping'? Nope, not in the constitution. Abortion laws? Well... umm... state rights.
It's these stances that get the geek-community all glowing and gushing with support. They don't consider the other side of that which is that he's also in favour of unregulated businesses. So while a lack of regulations might be good for your personal freedoms and allow you to exercise your good conscience he'll also allow business to rely on it's own conscience. Ultimately the free market optimizes profits and without regulations (or government interference in libertarian speak) then human rights, the environment and economy have 0 cost associated to them.
posted by substrate at 6:54 AM on April 27, 2008
It's these stances that get the geek-community all glowing and gushing with support. They don't consider the other side of that which is that he's also in favour of unregulated businesses. So while a lack of regulations might be good for your personal freedoms and allow you to exercise your good conscience he'll also allow business to rely on it's own conscience. Ultimately the free market optimizes profits and without regulations (or government interference in libertarian speak) then human rights, the environment and economy have 0 cost associated to them.
posted by substrate at 6:54 AM on April 27, 2008
The voices under my foil hat suspect that, once this goes through committee and under the rubric of "empowering the consumer", it will be amended in such a way that the outright use of genetic information will be illegal without the expressed consent on the part of the consumer, as per HIPAA rules. This will allow insurers to collect the genetic information, since an applicant has to sign a HIPAA waiver whenever they apply for insurance.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:10 AM on April 27, 2008
posted by Thorzdad at 7:10 AM on April 27, 2008
Oh, FCS.
There's a better solution to the insurance problem, and it's not wide-spread discrimination on the part of insurance companies, nor is it completely ignoring all risk. It's remembering that your genetics are not your destiny.
If you wind up getting tested and have a high probability of developing breast cancer in, say, the next five years, it doesn't mean you're definitely going to get breast cancer. It does mean, however, that you should probably make sure to get a mammogram every year. If something happens, but you catch it early enough, the total cost of dealing with it goes down. If you're an insurance company, maybe you charge this person a little more money, but you also make getting a yearly mammogram part of the contract--fail to get it, and your premium goes up.
(This is one of those situations where all employees need to be guaranteed a day off for medical reasons, in addition to any other time off that they get.)
If you set up the system this way, it's a rare case where everybody wins. The person in risk of cancer has to get preemptive care, ultimately reducing her total cost, and the insurance company gets to more accurately reflect its risk while also cutting its costs.
The biggest problem with the medical industry in the US right now* is that no one's willing to get the preventative care that they need. When things go really wrong, it costs a lot more to fix.
Of course, a government sponsored insurance system would help here, too.
*Aside from corporations buying a hospital and trying to squeeze every dollar of profit out of it by cutting staff and overworking the rest.
posted by thecaddy at 7:50 AM on April 27, 2008
There's a better solution to the insurance problem, and it's not wide-spread discrimination on the part of insurance companies, nor is it completely ignoring all risk. It's remembering that your genetics are not your destiny.
If you wind up getting tested and have a high probability of developing breast cancer in, say, the next five years, it doesn't mean you're definitely going to get breast cancer. It does mean, however, that you should probably make sure to get a mammogram every year. If something happens, but you catch it early enough, the total cost of dealing with it goes down. If you're an insurance company, maybe you charge this person a little more money, but you also make getting a yearly mammogram part of the contract--fail to get it, and your premium goes up.
(This is one of those situations where all employees need to be guaranteed a day off for medical reasons, in addition to any other time off that they get.)
If you set up the system this way, it's a rare case where everybody wins. The person in risk of cancer has to get preemptive care, ultimately reducing her total cost, and the insurance company gets to more accurately reflect its risk while also cutting its costs.
The biggest problem with the medical industry in the US right now* is that no one's willing to get the preventative care that they need. When things go really wrong, it costs a lot more to fix.
Of course, a government sponsored insurance system would help here, too.
*Aside from corporations buying a hospital and trying to squeeze every dollar of profit out of it by cutting staff and overworking the rest.
posted by thecaddy at 7:50 AM on April 27, 2008
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posted by Second Account For Making Jokey Comments at 5:07 AM on April 27, 2008