Posted on 03/10/2017 8:10:21 AM PST by MarchonDC09122009
House GOP would let employers demand workers' genetic test results
https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/10/workplace-wellness-genetic-testing/
House Republicans would let employers demand workers’ genetic test results
By Sharon Begley @sxbegle
March 10, 2017
A little-noticed bill moving through Congress would allow companies to require employees to undergo genetic testing or risk paying a penalty of thousands of dollars, and would let employers see that genetic and other health information.
Giving employers such power is now prohibited by legislation including the 2008 genetic privacy and nondiscrimination law known as GINA. The new bill gets around that landmark law by stating explicitly that GINA and other protections do not apply when genetic tests are part of a “workplace wellness” program.
The bill, HR 1313, was approved by a House committee on Wednesday, with all 22 Republicans supporting it and all 17 Democrats opposed. It has been overshadowed by the debate over the House GOP proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, but the genetic testing bill is expected to be folded into a second ACA-related measure containing a grab-bag of provisions that do not affect federal spending, as the main bill does.
“What this bill would do is completely take away the protections of existing laws,” said Jennifer Mathis, director of policy and legal advocacy at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, a civil rights group. In particular, privacy and other protections for genetic and health information in GINA and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act “would be pretty much eviscerated,” she said.
Employers say they need the changes because those two landmark laws are “not aligned in a consistent manner” with laws about workplace wellness programs, as an employer group said in congressional testimony last week.
Top wellness award goes to workplace where many health measures got worse
Employers got virtually everything they wanted for their workplace wellness programs during the Obama administration. The ACA allowed them to charge employees 30 percent, and possibly 50 percent, more for health insurance if they declined to participate in the “voluntary” programs, which typically include cholesterol and other screenings; health questionnaires that ask about personal habits, including plans to get pregnant; and sometimes weight loss and smoking cessation classes. And in rules that Obama’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued last year, a workplace wellness program counts as “voluntary” even if workers have to pay thousands of dollars more in premiums and deductibles if they don’t participate.
Despite those wins, the business community chafed at what it saw as the last obstacles to unfettered implementation of wellness programs: the genetic information and the disabilities laws. Both measures, according to congressional testimony last week by the American Benefits Council, “put at risk the availability and effectiveness of workplace wellness programs,” depriving employees of benefits like “improved health and productivity.” The council represents Fortune 500 companies and other large employers that provide employee benefits. It did not immediately respond to questions about how lack of access to genetic information hampers wellness programs.
Rigorous studies by researchers not tied to the $8 billion wellness industry have shown that the programs improve employee health little if at all. An industry group recently concluded that they save so little on medical costs that, on average, the programs lose money. But employers continue to embrace them, partly as a way to shift more health care costs to workers, including by penalizing them financially.
Do workplace wellness programs improve employees’ health?
The 2008 genetic law prohibits a group health plan — the kind employers have — from asking, let alone requiring, someone to undergo a genetic test. It also prohibits that specifically for “underwriting purposes,” which is where wellness programs come in. “Underwriting purposes” includes basing insurance deductibles, rebates, rewards, or other financial incentives on completing a health risk assessment or health screenings. In addition, any genetic information can be provided to the employer only in a de-identified, aggregated form, rather than in a way that reveals which individual has which genetic profile.
There is a big exception, however: As long as employers make providing genetic information “voluntary,” they can ask employees for it. Under the House bill, none of the protections for health and genetic information provided by GINA or the disabilities law would apply to workplace wellness programs as long as they complied with the ACA’s very limited requirements for the programs. As a result, employers could demand that employees undergo genetic testing and health screenings.
While the information returned to employers would not include workers’ names, it’s not difficult, especially in a small company, to match a genetic profile with the individual.
That “would undermine fundamentally the privacy provisions” of those laws,” said Nancy Cox, president of the American Society of Human Genetics, in a letter to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce the day before it approved the bill. “It would allow employers to ask employees invasive questions about … genetic tests they and their families have undergone” and “to impose stiff financial penalties on employees who choose to keep such information private, thus empowering employers to coerce their employees” into providing their genetic information.
If an employer has a wellness program but does not sponsor health insurance, rather than increasing insurance premiums, the employer could dock the paychecks of workers who don’t participate.
The privacy concerns also arise from how workplace wellness programs work. Employers, especially large ones, generally hire outside companies to run them. These companies are largely unregulated, and they are allowed to see genetic test results with employee names.
They sometimes sell the health information they collect from employees. As a result, employees get unexpected pitches for everything from weight-loss programs to running shoes, thanks to countless strangers poring over their health and genetic information.
Sharon Begley can be reached at sharon.begley@statnews.com Follow Sharon on Twitter @sxbegle
Privacy Policy | Comment Policy Steve March 10, 2017 at 8:18 am I’m sorry, but why do we need someone’s genetic information in order to execute a workplace wellness program? What if the employee is screened and determined to have a variant that has a high likelihood of causing cancer in the near future.
The employer would know that would increase their payouts, so they could find a way to terminate the employee.
There are all sorts of ethical dilemmas that could play out if employers have the genetic information of their employees.
Uniparty fascism at its most obvious here.
Who, specifically, among his constituents asked him to introduce this legislation?
Or is he merely a pawn for some lobby?
I used to live in her district. Met her a number of times.
She is a textbook study in how a well-meaning conservative devolves into one of the GOPe.
Now, if they only were allowed to request it to compare with the (supposedly on the way) new biometric visa program, to make sure its directed at Non-Citizens, then MAYBE it would be marginally acceptable. If not, it's just another nationalized healthcare step towards government rules on who gets treated or not; who lives and who dies.
Sheesh! With R friends like these, who needs an enemy???
”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.
This is a state power issue.
Corrections, insights welcome.
Drain the swamp! Drain the swamp!
Remember in November ’18 !
Since Trump entered the ’16 presidential race too late for patriots to make sure that there were state sovereignty-respecting candidates on the primary ballots, patriots need make sure that such candidates are on the ’18 primary ballots so that they can be elected to support Trump in draining the unconstitutionally big federal government swamp.
Such a Congress will also be able to finish draining the swamp with respect to getting the remaining state sovereignty-ignoring, activist Supreme Court justices off of the bench.
Noting that the primaries start in Iowa and New Hampshire in February ‘18, patriots need to challenge candidates for federal office in the following way.
Patriots need to qualify candidates by asking them why the Founding States made the Constitution’s Section 8 of Article I; to limit (cripple) the federal government’s powers.
Patriots also need to find candidates that are knowledgeable of the Supreme Court's clarifications of the federal government’s limited powers listed below.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
”State inspection laws, health laws, and laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c. are not within the power granted to Congress [emphasis added].” —Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.
I see this from the other side. If you work for me and the law requires me to pay for your medical insurance, you can be damn sure that I want to know about all your defects.
That’s our good old GOP totalitarians. We leave the revolutionary socialist world, and step into corporate mercantile authoritarianism.
Google and Facebook will quickly offer to buy all the DNA results from employers, who can then legally require it of you. They build a giant national DNA database.
Awesome work guys./s
Worse than that.
I betcha this bill was written by a handful of 25-year old staffers from Georgetown and Rep. Foxx barely skimmed it before introducing.
Just ... hell NO!
Well, the “trick” is to get the employer out of the business of defining and supplying health insurance plans for their employees, even if employers keep some commitment to making contributions paying something on the premiums of the private health insurance that the employee chooses.
That removes the risk the employer takes when they take on backing or managing a single health insurance plan just for their employees. Their risk is reduced to just whatever contribution they committed to paying for the private insurance plan the employee chose. The premiums and performance of that insurance plan are not of any risk concern to the employer, and therefor they have no need to question any employee conditions that may contribute to the costs that plan might incur.
However, that would not dispel any legitimacy of private insurance plans from asking the same questions that people think their employers should not be asking.
It is more and more being understood that genetic factors are landmarks to a range of possible medical problems as well as how well different medications do and do not work 100% the same with everyone. Why would an insurance company not want to know that information. EVERYTHING in planning for insurance risks and what it will cost IS about statistical probabilities, not anecdotal cases that don’t fit a statistical norm. No one who plots that and the dollars involved knows you personally, and because they know you personally sets your insurance premium rate. What they do know is what you represent, statistically, and it is statistics and history of claims, not you personally, that are used to determine insurance premiums.
The foundational problem here is the employer being made responsible to provide for the enployees health. The desire to know health information about the employee springs from it. Bad policy begets problems that demand more bad policy.
[HR 1313 sponsor] Thank you - I was just about to do a search.
This can be criticized, of course, for cherry picking what previous over-extension of Federal Power, you will roll back.
Telling employers they cannot question the health of employees is not the only absurdity in present legislation. The whole raft of meddling in private contracts under the pretense that they have an incidental effect on Interstate Commerce, needs to be reexamined.
Dictating social policy was never the Founder's intention in forming a Federal Union.
Hypothetically....
I am an employer. And I am sick of paying for Sickle Cell treatments. So I demand genetic profiles to weed-out any that might carry this trait.
Members of Congress don’t see an obvious problem with THAT???
It should come as no surprise when Big Government genuflects before their corporate paymasters.
As of Sept 15 2015 US gov’t agencies have the ability and permission to obtain and share ALL of your personally identifable information and health data for the purpose of creating a citizen behavioral health database.
ALL of your personal health information (medical history) is shared by unaccountable / unmonitored data brokers in a multi-Billion dollar Big Data scheme.
thedatamap.org
(Harvard Medical data privacy study)
Obama Issues Executive Order for Use of Behavioral Data
*The Uniparty fully approves of this.
Too much sh1t distractions by MSM and Congressional miscreants.
Hope this matter gets DJT and deplorable’s attention to kill this nightmare Soviet-Nazi “desirable citizen” plan.
Our side of the uniparty is shameful and shameless!
Foxx R VA
Our side of the uniparty is shameful and shameless!
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