On October 1, the Senate began its consideration of a bill (S. 1053) that would prohibit employers and health insurance companies from discriminating against applicants based on genetic information.
Sponsored by Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act would prohibit insurance companies and employers from using the results of genetic tests to deny coverage, raise insurance premiums, or to make hiring decisions. With existing gene tests able to predict a person’s risk for heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and some cancers, patients’ advocates have worried that fears of losing a job or health coverage have precluded people from accessing the potentially life-saving genetic profiles.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) said that when the Senate first began its work on this legislation several years ago “almost a third of women, one out of three, of the women offered a test for breast cancer risk at the National Institutes of Health declined the test. The reason they gave at that time for declining the test was that the result might in some way be made available to an insurance company which would then use that data, that information, to discriminate against them in whether health insurance would be issued to them.”
S. 1053 also would bar insurance companies and employers from requesting genetic tests and would apply the same procedures and remedies as other forms of discrimination, such as race under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Workers could sue employers that violated the rules. The Senate plans to approve S. 1053 by unanimous consent on September 14. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) has introduced comparable legislation (H.R. 1910) in the House.
