Former US President Barack Obama is frustrated that the use of genetics hasn't yet realized its full potential and attributes this to the sluggish US healthcare system.Scientists believed the publication of the first drafts of the human genome in the early 2000s would herald in a new era of medicine. The cost of reading a person’s full genome, or all their genetic information, has decreased from around $100 million a person to less than $1,000. Obama, who claims he became intensely interested in the developing field while he was president, is frustrated that genome sequencing hasn't yet entered the mainstream.
At a symposium organized by Illumina Inc., the leading manufacturer of devices that can read DNA, Obama said: "I've been frustrated by the fact that we're still not leveraging even the data we presently have."
Obama attributes the sluggish development to the US healthcare system, which offers clinicians incentives that aren't always clear-cut and encourage them to provide "disease treatment" rather than health care.
“To the extent progress has been slower than I would’ve anticipated has less to do with the particulars of precision medicine but has more to do with the fact we still have a huge, creaking health-care system that accounts for one-sixth of the US economy,” Obama said.
He claimed that a non-employer based, single-payer healthcare system provides a "smarter" strategy than the cumbersome US system. Reform is considerably simpler when there is a single, cohesive body rather than a large cast of characters with "power spread everywhere."
According to him, expanding datasets would lower costs even more while enabling researchers to draw more connections between various genetic sequences and diseases.
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