Rolling back the US Affordable Care Act could affect people's willingness to undergo genetic testing, write Sarah Lawrence College's Laura Hercher and the University of Iowa College of Law's Anya Prince in an opinion piece at BuzzFeed News.
When the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act was passed and signed into law in 2008, it made it illegal in the US for health insurers and employers to discriminate based on genetic information. But as Hercher and Prince note in their opinion piece, there was also a grey area falling between genetic susceptibility and when disease becomes apparent, as GINA only protects against discrimination based on genetic data, not when people become ill.
This gap, they note, was bridged by the ACA, also known as Obamacare, which required insurers to cover individuals with pre-existing conditions. But the ACA is increasingly being threatened in court, and Hercher and Prince note that if the law is struck down, so is this protection.
"In this age of effective and widespread genetic testing, we don’t want people to turn down the tests because they fear a positive result will be used against them," they write at BuzzFeed News.