Three essays on health and health care in society: public values, genomic policies, and socio-technical futures of our lifespan

Each of the three essays in this dissertation examine an aspect of health or health care in society. Areas explored within this dissertation include health care as a public value, proscriptive genomic policies, and socio-technical futures of the human lifespan. The first essay explores different forms of health care systems and attempts to understand who believes access to health care is a public value. Using a survey of more than 2,000 U.S. citizens, this study presents statistically significant empirical evidence regarding values and other attributes that predict the probability of individuals within age-based cohorts identifying access to health care as a public value. In the second essay, a menu of policy recommendations for federal regulators is proposed in order to address the lack of uniformity in current state laws concerning genetic information. The policy recommendations consider genetic information as property, privacy protections for re-identifying de-identified genomic information, the establishment of guidelines for law enforcement agencies to access nonforensic databases in criminal investigations, and anti-piracy protections for individuals and their genetic information. The third and final essay explores the socio-technical artifacts of the current health care system for documenting both life and death to understand the potential for altering the future of insurance, the health care delivery system, and individual health outcomes. Through the development of a complex scenario, this essay explores the long-term socio-technical futures of implementing a technology that continuously collects and stores genetic, environmental, and social information from life to death of individual participants.