Convictions

Genetic Discrimination: Like Racism?

Eric, I’m with you about the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. It sounds good at first: Everyone is worried about a Gattaca - type future* where people are shunned on the basis of genetic tests, leading to genetic manipulation, eugenics, and a dystopia where everyone lives in Frank Lloyd Wright-style buildings, wears Jil Sander suits, and looks as gorgeous as Uma Thurman (so, OK, this last bit doesn’t sound so bad …).  

But if we really think it’s invidious to tie health insurance premiums to risks, perhaps we should consider socialized medicine where everyone pays the same, state-enforced premium.   We all know how popular that idea is in the United States, which suggest that people want a market-based system. It is odd indeed that people seem comfortable with the part of the market that distributes care based on ability to pay but not with the part that would tie the price to the amount of care consumed (or likely to be consumed).   The perverse result of this law is that poor people with low health risks are forced to effectively subsidize rich people with high risks.   This is a law both left and right should have opposed (or at least questioned).

Why didn’t anyone oppose it?   I suspect some of the reason is the subtle (or not) analogy to race and sex discrimination—what I’ve called Racism by Analogy.   It’s tempting to think that the moral lesson of the civil rights revolution is that we should discriminate only on the basis of desert, but in fact any meritocratic society also entails lots of discrimination on the basis of inherited and unearned virtues, such as intelligence, height, physical strength, and good looks. It’s not “fair” (just as it’s not fair that I wasn’t born with Denzel Washington’s looks and Tiger Wood’s hand/eye coordination), but genetic discrimination is unlike race and sex discrimination along precisely the dimension that matters:  R ace and sex are widely used, culturally reinforced, and often poor proxies for personal virtues (stereotypes) that reinforce widespread and illegitimate social hierarchies. Genetics are just the opposite—they are in many cases extremely good proxies for personal virtues (health) that won’t lead to entrenched social hierarchies.   And, unlike race and sex, there’s no history and custom of irrational prejudice surrounding genetics, so there’s no reason to suspect that genetic information will be widely misused.

* Correction, May 6, 2008 : This post originally misspelled the title of the movie Gattaca .