On June 20th, the Petrie-Flom Center welcomed Susannah Baruch on board as its new Executive Director.
Susannah comes to the Petrie-Flom Center with expertise in reproductive health law policy, genetics, and genomics, and a wealth of experience in nonprofits, academia, and government. We asked Susannah to share a bit about herself and her past work by way of introduction to Bill of Health’s readers.
The following interview has been edited and condensed.
By Kaitlyn Dowling, based on research by the Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
In a year-long series on Bill of Health, we’ll be exploring the legal scholarship on genetic non-discrimination. We’ll talk more about GINA and state laws protecting citizens from genetic discrimination. We hope these posts help shed light on this complex and ever-more-relevant area for legal scholars, policymakers, and the public at large. Read the previous posts in the series.
Most states regulate the use of genetic information in some way, but protections are typically limited to employment and insurance. To most people, those two areas of protection seem obvious: it’s easy to see why your health insurer would want to know if you’re likely to become expensive to cover. Likewise, you can also understand why potential employers would want to know if they’re about to hire a worker who’s likely to need significant time off to attend to health issues. Only a select number of states ban genetic information discrimination in other contexts, like education, disability insurance, and life insurance.
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