Miguel Afonso Caetano"What happened to Bill, and to dozens of other people whose experiences have been documented by disease advocates and on social media, is perfectly legal. Gaps in the United States’ genetic-nondiscrimination law mean that life, long-term-care, and disability insurers can obligate their customers to disclose genetic risk factors for disease and deny them coverage (or hike prices) based on the resulting information. It doesn’t matter whether those customers found out about their mutations from a doctor-ordered test or a 23andMe kit.
For decades, researchers have feared that people might be targeted over their DNA, but they weren’t sure how often it was happening. Now at least a handful of Americans are experiencing what they argue is a form of discrimination. And as more people get their genomes sequenced—and researchers learn to glean even more information from the results—a growing number of people may find themselves similarly targeted."
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