As our medical screening abilities become more comprehensive
so too, it would seem, does our potential health care benefits. According to
the New York Times article Employees Jump
at Genetic Testing. Is That a Good Thing? By Natacha Singer, companies all
across nation, like Visa, General Electric, Levi’s, and many more, have started
including genetic screening as part of their company health care programs. Ideally
this is to make it possible for employees to see if they have any genetic/heritable
predisposition to a disease so that they may be able to take preventable measures/medical
counseling earlier before they are affected, when costs of dealing with ailments
are cheaper. And yes, these screening are both novel and optional.
Yet while in theory this addition to company health benefits
would improve costs and employee health there are many other concerns around its
application in the work place. The main concern being that participants might
take the results of these genetic tests, which are by no means 100% accurate, too
literally and look at them as a diagnosis, not realizing that they just show
potential increased or decreased probability. This intern could cause participants
to take drastic or unnecessary health precautions and/or procedures that end up
doing patients more physical and financial harm than good, and vice versa the
genetic results could give patients a false sense of security if they come up
negative, resulting in them not taking the standard recommended medical
screenings. Yet, as this new benefit enters the work place we will begin to see
if it does more harm than good, as it is way to early to tell, but if in know people then I think this will probably end in an influx of unnecessary procedures and panic, as most people are not that educated on this subject.
For the original article go to https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/15/technology/genetic-testing-employee-benefit.html
For more on genetic screening/testing check this link out https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/testing/genetictesting
