Health Insurance and GINA

 Introduction to health insurance:

Health insurance plays a crucial role in one's life. It covers medical expenses arising due to ailments. Two types of health insurance include mediclaim, and essential unwellness insurance plans.

 A mediclaim organizes a basic form of insurance plan. It covers the value of treatment after getting admitted to the hospital. One requires to submit the original bills generated due to hospitalization. Many plans cover the whole family to some limit.

 A Critical illness insurance plans cover expenses for critical diseases. They need long-term treatment and the cost of medicines and hospitalization.

In a motivational video, a Down ’s syndrome girl was addressing questions from all the people. What is a big issue with people having disabilities? Aren’t they eligible for accomplishing their dreams? Yes everybody has an equal right of doing what they like to do. Going to the desired school or college, playing sports, dreaming of an excellent job, earning money, getting life insurance and policies, and many more things are dreams of all human beings. None of them should be refrained from doing so.

With advances in genome biology, molecular genetics, and other life-enhancing tools, it is now easy to sequence the genome and receive valuable information as a life savior. Your DNA does not just carry information about who you are but also your future personality. The advantages of the latest genetic technology could help us know our ethnic origin, our family members, hereditary factors, possible future risks of the disease, and personalized medicine. However, this information could be misused by others if revealed. This is covered by the Anti-Genetic discrimination law.

What is Anti-Genetic discrimination law?

 It is a new federal law that protects Americans from discrimination by insurance agencies and employers, due to some genetic complications. The genetic test results have a typical specialty of revealing the future disease that could enter your life and this information was being misused by insurance agencies and employers. For example, those who revealed possible yes from the presence of BRCA gene mutation were susceptible to getting breast cancer in the future. Such people refrained from getting jobs and insurance policies. Therefore a separate law was laid for the protection of people with genetic predispositions and genetic disorders for obtaining insurance or a dream job.

What is GINA?

GINA is known as the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act. GINA act made it illegal for those who forced individuals to disclose their genetic information to obtain employment, housing, adoption, schooling, or insurance.

GINA has two parts:

Title I: It prohibits genetic discrimination in health insurance.

Title II: It prohibits genetic discrimination in employment.

GINA impacted positively people to get their genetic tests done and use them as possible tools in the prevention of disease and treatment interventions. This was possible by conducting a project that involved people identifying genetic discrimination. The study target was people with a genetic disorder. They selected Huntington’s disease. 40% of the people with Huntington’s disease were experiencing genetic discrimination in reference to getting access to the life insurance policy and long-term disability insurance. Those detected with Huntington’s disease had chances of getting chorea and disabilities after 15-20 years of genetic detection. But that does not mean the person has refrained from work right away.

However, the lacuna in this law as included in the National Human Genome Research Institute website state that these GINA laws do not completely cover life insurance, disability insurance, and long-term care insurance. The moral of the story is laws laid by those agencies are helpful however people are working more on this subject as certain areas such as life insurance, disability insurance, and long-term care insurance need more attention as they are not fully covered in the law. Many cases of genetic discrimination are still being reported. Genetic privacy and genetic non-discrimination must be addressed by GINA more rapidly and derive new laws that may help to support the people.

References:

https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/testing/discrimination

https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/48687/title/Protecting-Patients-from-Genetic-Discrimination/

https://www.genome.gov/10002328/genetic-discrimination-fact-sheet/

http://www.ginahelp.org/GINAhelp.pdf