Posted on 10/08/2007 10:19:50 AM PDT by Jean S
They’re watching you right now.
They counted every beer you drank during last night’s Red Sox [team stats] game.
They see you sneaking out to the garage for a smoke.
They know if you’ve got a gun, and where you keep it.
They’re your kids, and they’re the National Security Agency of the Nanny State.
I found this out after my 13-year-old daughter’s annual checkup. Her pediatrician grilled her about alcohol and drug abuse.
Not my daughter’s boozing. Mine.
“The doctor wanted to know how much you and mom drink, and if I think it’s too much,” my daughter told us afterward, rolling her eyes in that exasperated 13-year-old way. “She asked if you two did drugs, or if there are drugs in the house.”
“What!” I yelped. “Who told her about my stasher, I mean, ‘It’s an outrage!’ ”
I turned to my wife. “You took her to the doctor. Why didn’t you say something?”
She couldn’t, she told me, because she knew nothing about it. All these questions were asked in private, without my wife’s knowledge or consent.
“The doctor wanted to know how we get along,” my daughter continued. Then she paused. “And if, well, Daddy, if you made me feel uncomfortable.”
Great. I send my daughter to the pediatrician to find out if she’s fit to play lacrosse, and the doctor spends her time trying to find out if her mom and I are drunk, drug-addicted sex criminals.
We’re not alone, either. Thanks to guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics and supported by the commonwealth, doctors across Massachusetts are interrogating our kids about mom and dad’s “bad” behavior.
We used to be proud parents. Now, thanks to the AAP, we’re “persons of interest.”
The paranoia over parents is so strong that the AAP encourages doctors to ignore “legal barriers and deference to parental involvement” and shake the children down for all the inside information they can get.
And that information doesn’t stay with the doctor, either.
Debbie is a mom from Uxbridge who was in the examination room when the pediatrician asked her 5-year-old, “Does Daddy own a gun?”
When the little girl said yes, the doctor began grilling her and her mom about the number and type of guns, how they are stored, etc.
If the incident had ended there, it would have merely been annoying.
But when a friend in law enforcement let Debbie know that her doctor had filed a report with the police about her family’s (entirely legal) gun ownership, she got mad.
She also got a new doctor.
In fact, the problem of anti-gun advocacy in the examining room has become so widespread that some states are considering legislation to stop it.
Last year, my 7-year-old was asked about my guns during his physical examination. He promptly announced to the doctor that his father is the proud owner of a laser sighted plasma rifle perfect for destroying Throggs.
At least as of this writing, no police report has been filed.
“I still like my previous pediatrician,” Debbie told me. “She seemed embarrassed to ask the gun questions and apologized afterward. But she didn’t seem to have a choice.”
Of course doctors have a choice.
They could choose, for example, to ask me about my drunken revels, and not my children.
They could choose not to put my children in this terrible position.
They could choose, even here in Massachusetts, to leave their politics out of the office.
But the doctors aren’t asking us parents.
They’re asking our kids.
Worst of all, they’re asking all kids about sexual abuse without any provocation or probable cause.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has declared all parents guilty until proven innocent.
And then they wonder why we drink.
Good! Because the single childless individual who is sick of loosing their freedom is the greatest threat to the Control Freak Powers that Be.
Run, do not walk, RUN from anything, and I seriously mean ANYTHING, that has any connection with the RWJ Foundation.
They want to know if you wack your kid on the keister once in awhile (which many younger kids need occasionaly)
I suspect we’ll all wind up getting together to pull these guys non-profit status (they are a 501C3 IRS designation) that allows them to hoard cash outside the tax system...cash that is used AGAINST Americans.
My daughter’s pediatrician waited until I was out of ear shot and whispered to my daughter that when the time comes and she wanted birth control pills that she’d write a prescription for it.
My daughter told me about this 3 hours later because she knew I would probably probably make a u-turn and go back and assault the physician. Of course I filed a complaint and we never went back to her.
The previous pediatrician told my daughter (who had asthma) that cigarettes were bad for her asthma but marijuana probably wasn’t bad for it.
The solution: LEAVE MASSACHUSETTS
The dems are talking about socialized medecine, aren’t they? Look what you get!
Ignore legal barriers? Is that, well . . . legal?
With all the worries that physicians have about lawsuits, it would seem unwise for them to "ignore legal barriers."
(That said, I can imagine a state granting immunity to doctors who ask such intrusive questions while penalizing those who do not. It is time to put a stop to this.)
His 7-year-old provided a great answer. That gives me an idea . . . .
Medical Imperialism. What’s new?
I served on the Board of Directors of an organization with a 501C3 status that was (and contiues to be) in direct opposition to anything supported by RWJF. That was not and is not the goal of the organization, but it just so happens that every nanny state iniative that we opposed has some connection to RWJF and so it looks like it.
The difference in our organizations is that we, unlike RWJF, were scrupulous in what we said, did, and how we reported our income to the IRS.
My 5-year-old told our pediatrician that he’s a Goa’uld, and his mother ship will land in Lake Park as soon as he sends the signal from the clock tower. Then he read all the warning labels in the room, told her that “stethoscope” had Greek roots, and sang the “Gilligan’s Island” theme.
She just rolled her eyes and reminded me to give him whole milk and a protein supplement!
These inquisitions, along with the suggestion that doctors ignore “legal barriers and deference to parental involvement,” are encouraged by the AAP but not required. That Massachusetts has embraced the practice is, sadly, no surprise but I'll hang on to my belief that pediatricians in other, more sensible parts of the country will choose not to put themselves at risk of lawsuit.
In any case, it's alarming that such guidelines exist.
BTTT
Actually, under HIPAA the ONLY entity that physicians can give medical records to without scads of paperwork IS the government (for cost control and quality purposes, of course).
HIPAA is 100 or so pages of the Clinton Health Security Act that managed to make it into law.
Oh really? And how many "thousands" of kids injured by their parents' "improperly-stored" guns would that be?
What a crock. The vast bulk of kids injured by firearms are gang-bangers who own illegal guns and it sure as hell isn't "thousands." I'd sure like to know the name of the creep at the AAP who cooked up this garbage.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were a total of only 37,000 children who suffered violent deaths between 1976 and 1994, or a little over a thousand per year. I'd hazard that it's a small fraction that were killed with firearms at all, much less by their parents' guns.
Agreed. I question whether I want to bring children into a society where it is drilled into them that their first allegiance is to the State, not their family. Increasingly, it seems that parents have been reduced to mere caretakers for the State, who can be yanked from the job at the whim of the employer.
Like taxes, like all socialist panaceas, at bottom they are fantasies of absolute power.You can't raise the price for legitimacy - tax rates - without reducing legitimacy, causing people either to work less or to work off the books. And you can't intrude into privacy via the children without making people less likely to decide to have kids.
Of course that fact doesn't register with people who brought us the Social Security Trust "Fund" which is actually an IOU the government wrote, and continues to write, to itself. When it comes time to actually redeem that "I owe myself," it will be only too obvious that that piece of paper is not an asset which will be of any use to our grandchildren when they have to pay our Social Security. And grandchildren that we do not have certainly won't help either.
Many doctor’s questionnaires I had to take recently, and one health survey for work, ask if you own a firearm and how many.
I usually say “Not applicable”, but had one doctor really push it.
Sounds like something my parents said I told my doc one time. Only I was really on shore duty from Galactica or something.
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