The US Department of Justice brought charges against thirty-five individuals who created an elaborate scheme to “provide” genetic testing for elderly individuals in an attempt to collect money from Medicare.
Their plan involved convincing Medicare recipients they needed genetic testing, often invoking the possibility of death. Willing participants would provide their identification, Medicare information, and a swab of saliva. Then, prescriptions would be written for the testing, sometimes without ever seeing the patient.
The patients never paid out of pocket; Medicare reimbursed the perpetrators for the tests. The recruiter, the doctor, and the lab would then split the money, upwards of $10k per test.
The scheme cost Medicare up to $2 billion.
What’s more, if the patient DOES need a genetic test down the line, Medicare can claim they already paid for one, leaving the patient out of luck.
The only positive I can draw from this is that there is now a large collection of genetic information which scientists can use to study which genes are present and death rates/causes of death. These were all individuals who would have, in my opinion, not participated in genetic testing to begin with, meaning their genetic data would have been lost. I’m not one of those conspiracy theorist who believe giving access to DNA is a bad thing. On the contrary, I think the more data present can only be a positive and can lead to insights which further push the amount of human knowledge.
This would make for a fascinating dystiopa where state-sponsored genetic testing creates a surveillance state. While everyone worries about face-recognition technology, a space filled with sensors could determine study the presence of DNA to determine who is where. The processing requirements would be massive but the surveillance state would be much more complete.
The concept could even be extended to neurochemicals within body fluids. If scientist could find out which ratio of chemicals were present the moment before someone committed murder, they could apply that analysis to prevent future mass shootings. If you’ve read 1984, this would be a form of thought-crime, though it wouldn't require mirrors to complete.
