Aboard the Genetic-Testing Freakout Bandwagon

And, now, it’s spurred a frantic public response to a bill that would untangle restrictions on workplace wellness programs, which can include DNA testing. H.R.1313, or the Preserving Employee Wellness Programs Act, was approved by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last Wednesday. According to committee chairwoman Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican and the bill’s sponsor, it’s meant to clear up a regulatory conflict and give more leeway to employers. Less so to kickstart the development of genetically superior workforce.

In reality, where we all technically still live, the bill would remove fairly recent EEOC rules that “clarified” statutes in the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which passed in 2008 amid concerns we might recognize today, to contradict the ACA’s rebate caps. These EEOC rules took effect just a month and a half ago. If they’re essential protections from gene-harvesting, in other words, our genes have all probably been harvested already.

Obamacare structured incentives for progress and participation in “voluntary” workplace wellness programs (like Race to the Top—but for workers’ fitness), which can include DNA collection from the insured and their dependents—and does in disease-monitoring programs focused on ailments like diabetes. Joining an employee wellness program, and submitting to the incumbent collection of DNA samples, earns you an insurance rebate. If you opt out, you won’t get the rebate. Under the Affordable Care Act, this is called “voluntary.”

EEOC hemmed in how voluntary (i.e., how heavily “incentivized”) the wellness programs were allowed to be, placing caps on the rebates that were actually incompatible with practices employers adopted under the Affordable Care Act.

Clarifying statutes in the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, the rules didn’t bear a ton of “legislative effect” beyond their capacity to bind up workplace programs in “Washington red tape.” Therefore, according to a spokesman for the Education and Workforce Committee, where the bill passed along party lines, H.R. 1313 doesn’t really do much beyond inciting panic: “All this bill does is reaffirm policies established years ago and ensure the rules governing these programs are clear and consistent for workers and employers to follow.”

And, from another spokesman’s defense of Foxx’s bill, “The whole purpose of her bill is to provide the private-sector the legal consistency it needs to continue offering these voluntary programs if they so choose.”

But, to the point that’s weirded out the world this week. Between the existing protections under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, discriminatory hiring based on DNA collection is illegal enough not to be worth the risk, I’ve been assured. Plus—and this one throws a dent in the believability of my screenplay—it turns out privacy restrictions under HIPAA also prohibit the sale of employees’ genetic material to mad scientists in Switzerland.

Generally, workplace wellness programs just encourage employees to keep healthy. The monetary endgame—not just to encourage healthy habits but to save money for workers and their employers—is premised on the assumption that fit and active employees cost less to insure. But wellness programs, according to Al Lewis writing at Harvard Business Review, aren’t actually that effective at saving employers money. He cited “ample evidence of [their] ineffectiveness, supported by a recent Aetna study, but allowed that improving technologies would make these practices more worthwhile. So far anyway, they’re a better deal for the employee who opts in and accepts the incentive. Although, having to withhold employees’ incentives en masse and all of sudden if, for whatever reason, the workforce is newly terrified of DNA collection could theoretically save the boss a bundle.

Still, the purpose of H.R. 3131, to untangle conflicting regulations and unburden employers, actually makes sense—whatever the theoretical subtext. So, it says something, probably, about our national tendency toward magical thinking in times of tense political transition that opposition to this bill’s extrapolatory science-fictional consequences has transcended partisan affiliation. There is no instinctive terror quite so unifying as an irrational fear of whatever dystopia might follow from technocrats’ prying into people’s DNA.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, for instance, said Sunday on Meet the Press that if there really were the sort of genetic testing bill marching through Congress that Chuck Todd described (there isn’t), “it sounds like there would be some significant concerns about it” and HHS might take a second look. Writers at Gizmodo, Fortune, and Vanity Fair likewise warned of a fast approaching dystopian descent. The irresistible “take”: In a world of rampant DNA collection, all of us ordinary folks will become as genetically-undesirable as poor Ethan Hawke in Gattaca (thanks to which he ended up married to Uma Thurman). Everyone knows the first of us to wither into obsolescence in a dawning totalitarian technocracy will be the genetically-flawed, we who are predisposed to imperfection by no fault of our own.

The science-fictional implications of deregulating a wellness program are too sinister not to spawn a dozen breathless blog posts. It’s also an inevitable post-Obama reawakening to the horrors of big government: The very idea of “employee wellness” is no creepier now than it was nine years ago—but only now is it acceptable to notice just how creepy it is. And it’s a more legitimate and pop-culturally familiar reason to panic than most of the news cycle nowadays. Nothing unites a divided a nation quite like a collective freakout that could have been cribbed from a horror movie.