One of the most rapidly advancing aspects of health care is genetic testing. It used to cost thousands of dollars but this cost has dwindled to the point where it is now well within the reach of the average person - and it can save lives.
Men and women have a very real interest in knowing if they have defects in genes known as BRAC 1 and 2. This gene defect involves breast cancer in women and prostate cancer in men, and it indicates the risk factor may increase by eighty percent if it is present. It is not unusual for some women to choose to have their breasts surgically removed to ensure that this form of cancer will not end their lives.
Unfortunately, genetic testing is now coming into conflict with the disclosure requirements of the insurance industry. Whenever we apply for insurance cover it is standard for the insurer to ask for full details of our previous health history. They want to know what diseases we have suffered - what surgery has been performed - and if we have had genetic testing we are obliged to give them the results.
Insurance is all about risk management - and this sort of information results in the applicant being either accepted or declined for insurance cover, and that can have a drastic effect from inability to gain insurance to cover a home mortgage to the simple policy we usually have to protect us against accidents when we travel overseas. Failure to truthfully disclose such information in an insurance application may render the cover void.
We are now seeing many people refusing gene testing because of the possible effect on their ability to gain insurance cover. Using this to refuse cover is a form of discrimination that it illegal in the US, Germany, Sweden, Lithuania, France, Portugal,Norway, Austria, Denmark and Belgium - but not here in Australia.
It seems to be a clash of privacy. When we undergo gene testing we gain an insight into what may happen to us in the future. Before, testing speculation on possible health outcomes is nobody's business but our own - but once that test is performed disclosure laws require it to be put on the table on demand.
The laws in place in other countries to deny insurers the right to use the results of gene testing in approving or rejecting insurance applications seems to rest on the division between the past - and the future. It accepts that the insurer has every right to know everything about our health up to this point in time, but as the future will be decided by the hand of fate that can not be known with certainty - that is excluded from consideration.
It can be argued that gene testing improves the odds of prediction, but in the wisdom of many other parliaments that will be kept a secret between the gene testing laboratory and the patient. It will not be available to other parties to influence outcomes.
It is important that this situation in Australia be clarified. Gaining insurance usually requires a medical examination and any person who fails such a test knows that such a disclosure will automatically cause future rejection. In many cases, the cause of that initial failure may have been surgically corrected or medically cured, but the fact that a rejection has occurred will see future applications rejected out of hand. Such is the stigma they hold.
Gene testing is a medical tool with great promise. There is the likelihood that as costs continue to decline it may become an automatic diagnostic in all hospital admissions. If so, under the present law regime it could become a weapon that influences the fiscal health of the innocent because it would then automatically become part of that persons medical history.
It seems that at the moment, Australia is out of step with the rest of the world !
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