GOVERNMENT & MEDICINE

Senate bill aims to ease fear of genetic testing

The medical community is pushing for a national standard of protections to encourage testing.

By Joel B. Finkelstein, AMNews staff. March 14, 2005.

Washington -- Jeffrey Weitzel, MD, is familiar with the real fear patients harbor about genetic discrimination.

In an informal poll of his patients, more than half reported that they had concerns about the possibility that their genetic test results would be used against them, said the director of the clinical cancer genetics program at the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, Calif.

And it's not just patients who are wary. Doctors are afraid of referring their patients for genetic tests, Dr. Weitzel said.

"Many times patients are either worried themselves about genetic discrimination or they were dissuaded from pursuing such an evaluation by their physicians," he said. This is because of the impression that the individual is "likely to suffer insurance discrimination, lose their insurance, lose their job or suffer any number of consequences because of that information."

Dr. Weitzel and others believe that these concerns are undermining genetic testing's potential. In just the past decade, the number of available tests has grown tenfold, to more than 1,000. Yet progress toward the broader adoption of these tests as the powerful predictive and diagnostic tools they are has been stymied by a lack of concise legal protections to reassure the public, experts said.

A bill passed unanimously in the Senate last month aims to address the problem by creating a national standard barring genetic discrimination by health insurers and employers.

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