Tag Archives: Do-Goodism

by | June 3, 2019 · 12:06 AM

Is GINA Unjust?

The Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act (GINA) of 2008 is widely regarded by the the genetics community as a critical piece of legislation. GINA provides safeguards against using genetic information to discriminate against healthy people when they apply for health insurance and employment. In what seems like a legislative fantasy from the perspective of today’s polarized American political climate, GINA passed by a vote 95-0 in the Senate, 414-1 in the House of Representatives (Ron Paul of Texas being the lone dissenter), and signed into law by President George W. Bush. It doesn’t get any more bipartisan than that.

I don’t know if anyone has ever studied the impact of GINA on utilization of genetic counseling and testing but my clinical experience, and I suspect that of many of my colleagues, is that discussion of GINA is a component of many genetic counseling sessions. The protections of GINA play a key role in the decision of many of my healthy patients to decide to undergo genetic testing (although Americans have divergent views about health insurance, they have broad feelings of mistrust of health insurers). I am pretty sure that support of GINA among genetics community is as unanimous as it was among the 2008 Congress. Unanimous, that is, except for me. Well, kind of.

Now hear me out before you consign me to Tweet Hell (which, if Dante were to write the Inferno today, he would include it as a 10th circle of Hell, below the 9th Circle of Treachery’s frozen lake where Judas Iscariot resides for sub-zero eternity). I have not sold our genetic savior for a sack of silver and I am not opposed to protecting people from discrimination in insurance and employment. With the future of health insurance in America in question, the prospect that GINA or the Afforable Care Act might one day be repealed gives me a serious case of the fantods. My criticism is that GINA is unfair to people who might suffer discrimination in health insurance for non-genetic reasons.

 

GINA is an example of genetic exceptionalism, the term coined in 1997  by the widely respected bioethicist Thomas Murray to describe the belief that “genetic information is sufficiently different from other kinds of health-related information that it deserves special protection or other exceptional measures.” Genetic exceptionalism has implications for other aspects of genetic medicine in addition to health insurance protection, as my DNA Exchange colleague Allie Janson-Hazell discussed some 8 years ago. Genetic exceptionalism has generated a quarter century of unresolved debate, with supporters waving it as a banner and critics using it as sword to attack the other side. Like Murray, I am critiquing GINA from the perspective of distributive justice – the just distribution of goods and resources.

The starting point of my argument is that, in the absence of compelling reasons otherwise, everyone should have equal access to affordable health insurance. From that perspective, GINA gives the appearance of being a good thing because it helps produce a more equitable distribution of medical insurance among healthy people who have a family history of a genetic condition or who carry a pathogenic mutation. But this is where genetic exceptionalism rears its head. What is it about genetic information that is so special that it requires its own piece of protective federal legislation? There are many other bits of health information of equal or greater import in predicting future health. My own hemoglobin A1C and fasting glucose levels for one, which are in the “prediabetic range” (though I could be “cured” simply by moving north a hundred miles to Canada, where the cut-off for an elevated A1C is higher than in the US). A perverse effect of GINA is that – should the Affordable Care Act be repealed – my A1C levels could be used against me in applying for health insurance but I would be protected from that same discrimination by GINA if a polygenic risk score, a more uncertain predictor of diabetes than A1C or fasting glucose levels, indicated I had an increased chance of developing Type 2 diabetes.The same could be said for lipid levels, blood pressure, Protein C levels, HPV status, and any of a number of other data points that are uncovered when doctors start probing around in the fluids and bodies of healthy patients.

The net effect of GINA when it passed, and could happen again if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, is an unfair distribution of health insurance such that healthy people who have non-genetic risk factors are not afforded equal protection. And, to pack the wound with some salt, this “non-genetic” risk pool could wind up paying higher insurance premiums that result from greater costs incurred by insurers for covering protected people with genetic risk factors who eventually develop breast cancer as the result of a BRCA pathogenic variant or Huntington disease due to an HTT pathogenic variant.

So GINA falls short in the bigger picture of distributive justice. By privileging genetic information, arguing that it is somehow more important than other medical information, GINA results in economic and health care inequities. The unintended implicit territorial message of  the genetics community’s praise of GINA is “Hey man, our patients are protected and that makes GINA a good thing.” But the good that GINA achieves can lead us to ignore its downsides. As I have argued before, our sense of Do-Goodism can create significant blind spots. It is difficult to defend a law as being just if it privileges one group of people at the cost of harming or excluding another group of people for what appear to be arbitrary reasons. GINA is a symptom of America’s ailing health system, not a cure.

Thanks again to Emily Singh for her graphics work.

4 Comments

Filed under Robert Resta

Tagged as , , ,

by | January 20, 2019 · 6:36 PM

The Benefits and Blinders of Do-Goodism

“All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.” Robert Louis Stevenson, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde

Genetic counselors are good people who want to do good. And that also goes for the vast majority of clinicians in all specialties and support staff who I have ever worked with. We may have brief dalliances with cynicism but overall we strive to be highly competent professionals who deliver compassionate care to patients in hopes of improving their physical and emotional health in small and large ways. We subscribe to the ethos of Do-Goodism – we strive to do good because it is the right thing to do. It’s why we drag ourselves out of bed and show up for work every day. It sure isn’t out of love for the daily commute, an overloaded work schedule, or the out-of-touch-with-reality dictates of upper level management.

Do-Goodism is a, well, good thing. There should be lots more of it in the world (especially among governments). But Do-Goodism has its downsides. Okay, let me stop right there. I am not criticizing Do-Goodism nor am I advocating for D0-Badism. So don’t accuse me of criticizing people for being good. But a  problem inherent to Do-Goodism is that can make it very difficult for us to see and acknowledge that when we try to do good things there can be bad outcomes. Our Good Filters block out the Bad Rays generated by our well-meaning actions. Recall what the road to you-know-where is paved with.

A good historical example of the blinders of Do-Goodism is eugenics, that bogeyman of every historical narrative of genetics. While nowadays we look down on eugenics with moral scorn, in fact, with a few obvious exceptions, many eugenics advocates in the US, the UK, and elsewhere genuinely thought they were improving not only the greater good of society but also the “dysgenic” families themselves. Philosophically, eugenics may have been closer to “a kind of genetic social work” than Sheldon Reed would have been comfortable acknowledging. Another historical example are the 19th century alienists who ran the so-called madhouses – whose records were critical to the development of modern genetics and eugenics – where “lunatics” were housed and supposedly cured with fantastical rates of supposed psychiatric problems such as masturbation and menstrual disorders.

Br. Benjamin Rush’s Tranquilizer for treating patients with mental illness. It “binds and confines every part of the body … Its effects have been truly delightful to me. It acts as a sedative to the tongue and temper as well as to the blood vessels.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do-Goodism still pervades genetic practice today, albeit in different forms. We sometimes advances policies, practices, and tests in the name of “helping people” when the benefit/downside ratio has not been well established. In my own practice of cancer genetic counseling, I think of how seamlessly BRCA testing has expanded to gene panels that include dozens of genes, many of which are of uncertain clinical utility. Even after ~25 years of research on BRCA we still debate the lifetime cancer risks, the mortality reduction of risk-reducing mastectomy, and the benefits of endocrine prophylaxis. In the US, Lynch syndrome patients are encouraged to join The Annual Colonoscopy for Life Club but the data is still not settled as to whether an annual colonoscopy is more beneficial than less frequent exams . And these are the genes that we know fairly well. The clinical implications  and best risk-reducing strategies for carriers of other typically tested genes like NBN, RAD51D, or BARD1 are pretty much anyone’s educated guess.

There are complex reasons why gene panel testing has become so widely incorporated into medical care. but I am pretty sure one of the motivating reasons we offer panel testing is that we think that by “finding an answer” to explain the family history, we are benefiting our patients. But are we really helping these patients by offering breast MRI screening with its high cost and false positive findings, risk-reducing surgeries, etc.? Are we explaining their family histories with these tests? Maybe we are, maybe we aren’t. We should have had that answer in hand before the testing was incorporated into clinical practice instead of turning a bunch of clinical patients into an unplanned and haphazard research project.

This was brought into sharp focus for me with a BRCA positive kindred I have been working with. A family member was identified as an asymptomatic BRCA mutation carrier, subsequently underwent risk-reducing surgery, and an occult Fallopian tube cancer was identified at an early enough stage that cure was highly likely. This made me feel like I should notch a victory mark on my belt. After all, preventing ovarian cancer is understandably offered as one of the urgent justifications of BRCA testing. I felt that I pulled the rug out from under ovarian cancer’s evil legs – until the patient died of complications of MRSA acquired during her hospital stay. And this in a situation where everyone would agree that the data strongly supports surgical risk-reduction. Should we be risking such outcomes by offering testing for genes in which there is no large body of research to support clinical recommendations?

Do-Goodism also pervades other areas of genetic testing and counseling. Expanded carrier screening. Noninvasive Prenatal Testing. Advocating for whole exome sequencing of newborns or of healthy adults. Direct-to-Consumer genetic testing. Clinicians and labs offer these tests in the name of helping people and democratizing genetic testing, but this can lead us to psychologically manipulate ourselves into ignoring or downplaying studies that suggest that maybe we should step back before we aggressively offer these tests. The blinders of Do-Goodism can be further exacerbated when our jobs seem to compel us to offer bigger and supposedly better tests to keep up patient volumes or corporate profits. Do-Goodism is not confined to genetics, of course. It also underlies long-standing debates about routine mammography, PSA screening for prostate cancer, and cardiac defibrillators in medically fragile elderly patients, to name a few.

We are not bad clinicians or evil profiteers, just human beings struggling with our psychological limitations. It’s why we need to thoughtfully listen to thoughtful critics who question our clinical practices. They make some very good points but only if we can allow ourselves to see them.

 

5 Comments

Filed under Robert Resta

Tagged as , , , ,