A newly released Wellcome Trust study has found the genetic markers for diseases such as "depression, Crohn's disease, coronary heart disease, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis, and type 1 and 2 diabetes." With new statistical analysis tools, they compared the DNA of thousands of people with and without the diseases' manifest symptoms and have pinpointed the actual genes that can show at birth how prone a person is or is not to developing these inherited diseases later in life.
This is all fantastic and wonderful and, as the BBC article quotes one doctor, "...should enable scientists to understand better how disease occurs, which people are most at risk and, in time, to produce more effective, more personalised treatments."
However, it will not be long before this information on individuals will start to inform the private health care industry's decision-making process.
This obviously opens up a medical ethics Pandora’s Box.
Given the forward direction of the arrow of medical and information science and progress, it is inevitability that DNA information on individuals will become available to the private health care industry. Legislation will be drafted to keep companies from basing decisions on coverage and premiums on such information (and it may be on the books already - I'm not an expert), but the power of large corporations to skirt the law in order to pad their bottom lines and CEO salary packages has been more than well documented, and these small cracks in the fragile walls erected by the legislatures will surely rupture under the constant pressure of this for-profit torrent.
The fact that this issue is not even discussed in the coverage by the BBC today highlights the fundamental difference in our approach to looking at health care. The rest of the world is right: health provisions for a citizenry of any society can not be governed by a free-market-corporate system of ethics. They can not because individuals are not free actors able to choose at leisure between products when they are faced with a health problem. Instead, health care must be governed by a "guardian" system of ethics (to paraphrase the late, great Jane Jacob's), which governs other things that are outside the reach of the invisible hand such as infrastructural improvement, fire protection, postal delivery, etc. Things in short that are necessities of cultural existence. We can't forgo them, or put them off for reasons of consumer savvy or financial planning.
I don't think that the proposals from the top tier Democratic presidential candidates, such as the latest one from Obama, would make the situation any better with respect to this. Perhaps they would...I'm interested in anyone's take on this. Am I overreacting? Can private health care be made to work as well as public health care?