The Human Genome Project and the Future of Health Care

This book examines how the Human Genome Project will reshape American health care. Leading scholars explore the clinical, ethical, legal, and policy implications of the Genome Project to see how it may affect the forms of health care available, who delivers it, who receives it, and who pays for it. Genetic prediction of future diseases - whether ineluctable certainties such as Huntington's, or uncertain "predispositions" for cancers, heart disease, and the like - will affect how patients and health professionals interact. It may force major reconsideration of certain institutions - such as health, life, and disability insurance - that rely on information about individuals' risks of illness and death. We may question what valid social purposes those institutions play and whether they are likely to become socially and ethically dysfunctional in light of the more extensive predictions that genetic information may make possible.