Posted on 09/11/2013 10:42:28 AM PDT by neverdem
If you think the Obama health law is only for the uninsured and you won’t be affected, you’re in for a surprise next time you go to the doctor. Be prepared for questions unrelated to why you are seeking medical help — questions that you don’t want to answer.
Whether you’re at the dermatologist or the cardiologist, you’ll likely be asked: “Are you sexually active? If so, do you have one partner, multiple partners or same-sex partners?”
Doctors are being turned into government agents, where they’re pressured financially to ask questions they consider inappropriate and unnecessary and violate their Hippocratic Oath to keep patients’ records confidential.
Going to the doctor can be embarrassing. But for your own good, you confide in your doctor, as you wouldn’t anyone else. What is happening here is different.
“This is nasty business,” says Dr. Adam Budzikowski, a New York cardiologist, who called the sex question “insensitive, stupid and very intrusive.” He could not think of an occasion when a cardiologist would need such information.
Doctors and hospitals who don’t comply with the federal government’s electronic health records requirements forego incentive payments now and face financial penalties from Medicare and Medicaid starting in 2015. The Department of Health and Human Services has already paid out over $12.7 billion in incentives to doctors and hospitals.
Dr. Richard Amerling, a nephrologist and associate professor of medicine at Albert Einstein Medical College, explains that your medical record should be “a story created by you and your doctor solely for your treatment and benefit.” But the Obama administration’s electronic record requirements are turning it “into an interrogation, and the data will not be confidential.”
Lack of confidentiality is what concerned the New York Civil Liberties Union in a 2012 report. Electronic medical records have enormous benefits, but with one click of a mouse, every piece of information in a patient’s record, including the social history, is transmitted, disclosing too much.
The social history questions also include whether you’ve ever used drugs, including IV drugs.
As the NYCLU cautioned, revealing a patient’s past drug problem, even if it was a decade ago, risks stigma.
On the other end of the political spectrum is the Goldwater Institute, a free-market think tank. It argues that by requiring everyone to have health insurance and then imposing penalties on insurers, doctors and hospitals that don’t use the one click electronic system, you are violating Americans’ medical privacy.
Protests from these privacy advocates are largely ignored. On Jan. 17, HHS announced that if patients want to keep something out of their electronic record, they should pay cash. That’s impractical for most people.
In 2010, when Congress was drafting Obamacare, the National Rifle Association saw the danger and demanded a protection that became Section 2716 of the final law. It bars the federal government from compelling doctors and hospitals to ask you if you own a firearm. That’s the only question they can’t be told to ask you.
Where are the women’s rights groups that went to the barricades in the 1980s and 1990s to prevent the federal government from accessing women’s health records? Hypocritically, they are silent now.
Patients need to defend their own privacy by refusing to answer the intrusive “social history” questions. If you need to confide something to your doctor pertaining to your own treatment, ask your doctor about keeping two sets of books so that your secrets stay in the office. Doctors take the Hippocratic oath seriously and will not be offended.
Are such precautions paranoid? Hardly. We are only beginning to see the data collection ambitions of the executive branch. On Sept. 6, The New York Times reported that Edward Snowden’s revelations show that the National Security Agency has “broadly compromised the guarantees that Internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online bank and medical records, would be undecipherable to criminals or governments.”
Be cautious about sharing your medical secrets with Uncle Sam.
Betsy McCaughey is a former Lt. governor of New York and the author of “Beating Obamacare.”
Look at how the IRS has already been used by Obama for political purposes. Now give the same political hacks in the IRS access to the medical records of all Americans. Not only could confidential medical records be used against political leaders, but even be used to deny medical treatment for political enemies.
Dr i live in a senior park i am the youngest man in there the over 60's are lined up down the street got any little blue pills for me!!!
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*ha*
Who DON’T???
(Research for the NEXT ‘fifty!)
Switch ‘could’ for ‘will be’.
Starting in Jan.
Want a side bet that a lot of people will suddenly have DNR added to their medical records?
So many bitched about the NSA while turning two blind eyes to the Obamacare violations against medical and personal privacy.
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Give them a copy of '50 Shades of Grey' instead, grin, and say "you know what I'm sayin'?"
HAD to???
Because if you have nothing to hide...etc.
Because every data point in that database is true and unaltered.
Like my fathers (non existent!) 60+yr smoking habit that prevented his receiving needed surgery last year. He wasn’t even given the option of surgery for his condition. As it turns out, because they thought he’d smoked for a lifetime.
He’s never smoked a cigarette in his life.
What else is wrong in any of our medical information entries?
around WHAT?
Terrible situation. Sorry to hear about that.
Whip it out and say, “He can speak for himself, as it would be hearsay from me.”
A while ago, I've read a thought provoking article about operation whose name I can not recall, mindblow or similar. It goes something like this. In case of civil unrest, U.S. government deliberately "leaks" huge amount of personal data of U.S. and non-U.S. citizens gathered through data mining, similar to wikileaks. In a split second, everything about you and everybody else is in public domain, indexed and searchable by whomever is interested. As a result, partnerships fail, divorces get tidal proportions, friendships sour, businesses go bankrupt and distrust becomes universal. Society as we know it is dead. Everybody is either smeared (deliberate errors in data mining) or publicly embarrassed.
This snooping could easily be part of such project.
How to handle it? Don't lie and don't tell the truth. Be creative.
Guaranteed to happen to most freepers when the time comes. And it’ll be like keeping ants out of the sugar bowl. Request your records, find mistakes, have them corrected. Only to find they ‘magically reappear’ 2 or 3m later.
Oh NO!
Tell the TRUTH; but scratch out YOUR name and write in Lazamataz!
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The LIVs will be taken care of just like they are taken care of now.
It'll come out of 'Obama's Stash'..........
You might find it interesting to learn how Frank Zappa died.
BWAWAWaaaaaaaaa........(cough, cough).........BWAWAWWAaaaaaaaa!!
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