Impact of genetic testing on surveillance and prevention

In this paper we consider the implications on two aspects of behaviour - surveillance to improve the chances of early detection of disease onset and preventive actions to reduce the probability of onset - that may change as a result of the acquisition of information from genetic tests. [...] In the context of our model everyone chooses the same level of surveillance in the absence of genetic test results being available and so there is no risk management role for insurance to cover the cost of surveillance ex ante to genetic testing.8 After genetic testing, however, public insurance provision provides better risk-sharing properties in re- gards to the di¤erential expected cost of heal [...] In developing the intuition about the value of GTs, it turns out to be convenient to consider the e¤ect of a marginal increase of information, i.e., an increase of ". Thus, a more precise test implies the probabilities of disease for tested negatives and tested positives approach the true probabilities of the disease of low and high risks (denote them by L H T and T ), which need not even be kno [...] It is worth demonstrating some properties of the function EU(s) in relation to the optimal choice of s (sb) as well as the e¤ect of a change in the probability of disease. [...] We keep the basic framework of the model in the previous section except that this time we are interested in how the level of prevention changes the probability of getting the disease at all.