Genetic Anti-Discrimination Act - Follow-up

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) is on its way to the President to be signed into law after the U.S. House earlier this week approved the version passed by the U.S. Senate last week. The Coalition for Genetic Fairness calls this a reason for everyone with DNA to rejoice.  The bill has been championed for 13 years by New York Representative Louise Slaughter, a  microbiologist by training. GINA protects individuals from employment and insurance discrimination based on their DNA. In an interview in this week's edition of the magazine Science, Slaughter says the law keeps social policy advancing in tandem with science. She believes removing the fear of lost jobs and denied insurance from the health equation extends the promise "to provide health care in an entirely new way. Not only to save billions of dollars in health care money, but we could save in human suffering."

The New York Democrat says her next project is to make the Food and Drug Administration "to be much stronger, much, much, much stronger." Earlier this week, the FDA announced plans to hire 1,300 biologists, chemists, pharmacologists and other staff members by October as part of a major expansion.

Cash Before Chemo

An article this week in the Wall Street Journal  about M.D Anderson's new cash up-front -before-treatment policy created a firestorm of reaction. The article details the story of an under-insured leukemia patient who was asked to pay $105,000 before the hospital would admit her for treatment.  She was admitted, she says, after arriving with a $45,000 check in hand, but only after a emotional scene in the hospital's business office. You can read the whole story here.  Or the first paragraph at the WSJ site here.

Read some of the blogosphere's  take from all over the political spectrum from The Huffington Post, Liberty Post,  and Topix.

If you thought a brush with a life-threatening illness like cancer turns cancer survivors into health nuts, you'd be wrong. A new report in the American Cancer Society's journal Cancer finds that  cancer survivors are no more likely to follow good nutrition and health recommendations than the population as a whole. This even though the study finds a better quality-of-life among survivors the more recommendations they followed.  Read more about the study from U.S .News and World Report health senior editor Katherine Hobson.