What if everyone's DNA was sequenced when they were born, and stored in a government database?
It turns out, in the USA, everyone's DNA is sequenced at birth already. There's a pinprick test to the heel that's required in all 50 states: they make 6 blood spots and test for a variety of genetic diseases that would be crippling or fatal if not treated, and they treat babies that have them. The states vary in how long they keep those blood spots. California, for example, keeps them forever, and sells them to researchers for $20 per spot (without names attached). However, nobody appears to automatically build a genome database out of them. They keep the blood, but they never record or quickly erase the computer records about the blood.
This question is about if they had a government computer database saying what everyone's genome was, gathered at birth.
If the database is extremely non-public, for example the NSA has it and never tells hospitals or law enforcement, then it's irrelevant for almost everyone.
If the database is accessible to law enforcement, there would cease to be such a thing as an unknown rapist. Sequence the semen from the rapist and you know who they are. Any crime where the criminal leaves enough of their DNA to be sequenced (blood, semen, maybe a hair, maybe some grease from their fingers) could identify the criminal. There are ways for DNA to be wrong (someone else had left a hair there earlier, identical twins, etc), but it's pretty strong evidence, and it takes very little work to obtain it.
If the database is accessible to insurance, they'll want to discriminate for and against people based on what genes they have. Insurance often can find your DNA already, and we're already working on laws so that people get insured regardless, so this isn't adding a new problem. So nothing much changes in regards to insurance.
If it's available to drug companies, they'll selectively advertise to the people who could benefit from their drugs.
If it's available to doctors, they will treat you according to your DNA. Doctors often already know your DNA, so nothing much changes here. Doctors will get better at treating you specific to your DNA as they get more techniques that are DNA specific. There aren't many such techniques now.
If it's available to children (really, available to any people), they can find out who their biological parents are easily.
Fathers can already send samples of their children't spit to 23andMe and tell with 100% certainty whether their children are really theirs. Mothers always know with 100% certainty that they give birth, but fathers forever have been about 90% certain whether they are biological fathers. This also catches babies being switched at birth.
The USA is using people's social security number as a secret unique identifier, despite them and several companies having databases linking people to SS numbers. Secrets that lots of people know aren't really secrets, so this never really works quite right. You could use DNA measured at birth to have real secret identifiers:
If the government (or anyone else) decided to persecute everyone with gene xxx, they'd know who those people were.
Genealogy could be done automatically.
Medical research can draw better conclusions when it has bigger datasets. This would give it the biggest dataset possible. However, usually medical research needs to know what actual traits people have as well as what their DNA is. They'd have to gather what traits specific people have separately, so maybe this wouldn't help that much after all.
I assume the public database would contain the DNA sequence, the name, the location at birth, and the date of birth. Name + location + date of birth is very close to unique. If the database contained more than that, more things become automatically knowable. If there are other databases mapping things to people, they can be joined to this database, so having those other database is equivalent to having all the data in one big database.
My take is that this is inevitable, and also an improvement over where we are today. We should make this database of everyone's DNA, and it should be public.
Some of the more objectionable things about this are due to DNA both being uniquely yours, and containing important information about you. The natural solution is to expose a hash of the DNA instead, which would still be unique but no longer reveal any other useful information. Unfortunately, sequencing DNA is noisy, so any DNA comparison has to correct for widespread errors. Any mistakes at all causes hashes to be useless. Is there a way to get a reliable unique summary from unreliable reads of DNA? If there is, that summary could be hashed.