New Hampshire has the distinction of being one America’s best educated states, with stellar college graduation rates and students achieving the highest SAT and ACT scores in the country. But Granite State lawmakers may want to brush up on their knowledge about public health and sex education.

According to the Concord Monitor, State Rep. Ralph Boehm (R-NH) introduced a bill to the House Education Committee yesterday that would allow parents to pull their children out of health or sex ed lessons for any reason at all. While New Hampshire law already allows parents to object to certain lesson plans on religious grounds, the proposed HB 161′s wording causes some lawmakers to worry it would give parents carte blanche over the crucial public health education their children receive, and veto power over the educators who provide it:

“In a lot of school districts, this is already the policy,” Boehm said yesterday. “And a lot of schools say it’s up to the parent. But the law says it must be a religious objection.”

Boehm has the support of Rep. Joe Pitre, a Rochester Republican, and Rep. Rick Ladd, a Grafton Republican who’s also a retired school principal. Although, Ladd said he’d like Boehm’s bill rewritten to require parents to give a “justifiable” reason for objecting.

“It can’t be, ‘I walk into the classroom and I don’t really like that teacher, so I’m just going to opt out,’ ” Ladd said.[...]

Rep. Judith Spang, a Durham Democrat on the committee, expressed similar concerns. She talked about the intersection of public health education and sex education and worried that students could be excused from health classes on preventing sexually transmitted diseases under the bill and existing law.

The fact is, sex education works. Multiple studies and real world examples have demonstrated that locales with strong sex education programs have lower rates of STIs and teen pregnancy.

But buoyed by the conservative religious right’s intensive lobbying, Republican state lawmakers have kept abstinence-only programs the norm and comprehensive sex education programs optional, making America more regressive on sex education policy than many Catholic countries. It should come as no surprise that American youth are woefully ignorant about sexual health and safety as a consequence.

Luckily, the trend may be limited. Recent surveys have shown that even Evangelical youth are moving away from an anti-contraception and anti-sex education mindset.

Underscoring the complexity of protecting consumers in an age of accelerating technological innovation, NPR reports that some insurance companies specializing in life insurance and long-term care can choose to discriminate against Americans based on their genetic makeup — and the companies could even subject prospective customers to genetic testing.

Thanks to the 2007 Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) successfully championed by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), health insurers cannot use a patient’s genetic information in order to hike their premium rates or curb benefits. “There were countless people in this country who were not eligible for insurance at all, simply by the way they were born,” Slaughter told NPR.

But GINA does not extend to the types of supplemental insurance that Americans predisposed to genetically-linked, degenerative diseases like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s are likely to purchase, leaving consumers’ premiums susceptible to their genome and pushing essential long-term care costs onto patients:

“GINA was a fabulous accomplishment,” says Robert Green, a researcher in the genetics department at Harvard Medical School. “It was long in coming and much needed. But I think that it was not perfect.”

Green oversaw a study that examined how people react after they learn they have ApoE4, a gene associated with Alzheimer’s. He found that people who discover they have the gene are five times more likely than the average person to go out and buy long-term-care insurance.[...]

Green says it’s especially ironic that GINA does not apply to long-term-care insurance policies, since they cover the costs of nursing homes, assisted living facilities, home health aides and other things that people with Alzheimer’s disease often need to use.

Long-term care insurers assert that not being able to incorporate information about consumers’ genetic dispositions into their premium rates would make their businesses unsustainable. It’s true that Americans who need long-term care are almost certain to be sicker and, therefore more costly to their insurance companies, than those with standard health coverage. But on the other hand, the services covered under such insurance plans — such as home assistance and health aides — are far more rudimentary than the complex and specialized medical treatments covered under standard insurance, so permanently charging Americans higher premiums because of their genetics ends up being excessive and discriminatory.

Other than extending GINA protections to long-term care and life insurance, lawmakers could also address the disparity by requiring health insurance plans to have more long-term care options, perhaps by making such care an “essential health benefit” under Obamacare.

And the issue of human genetics is likely to remain at the forefront of policy debates for the foreseeable future. The Supreme Court is already slated to hear a case on whether or not corporations can patent the detection of certain cancer-causing genes.