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.”
No, tell them this country is going to Hell in a handbasket and THEY are part of the problem; enabling a nosy government to become more and more controlling, socialist and communist.
I am REALLY tired of being told "If you're not part of the solution; you're part of the problem."
Where have our THINKERs gone?
In one generation we've gone from Bobby Fischer and chess to an enormous mass of video 'game' players!
Turnabout is fair play. Since we already have Barry's "sexual history," it is only fair that we share ours with him. He could use a more normal role model or two.
He got off on the wrong foot when Stanley got him that Indonesian Tranny Nanny.
“Thankfully my general practitioner is an old school dog...”
Your problem is he will just retire — walk away and you are back to square one.
I know. We need a whole new generation of patriot doctors.
“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.”
In other words, Obamacare eliminates the “privacy” between a patient and their doctor. Or to be more specific, they have legislated away Roe! I say we use their tool against them and eliminate the approval of Abortion as just simply a no longer affordable “medical procedure.” Hey, we need the future tax revenue and as a result it is in the interest of the common good that we increase births and therefore we will have a larger work force....
Thanks for the ping!
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What's up with the corners being first?
<8:)
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*snicker"
IT has had my number since DAY 1.
They asked if the DESKTOP was plugged in. Of course, it was not.
And its goes down from there. Usually they need to send a TECH down because I don't have the vocabulary to explain my problem.
I'm really going to double down work so i can I identify parts and what's in the box instead of saying to IT: "Its making a whirly sound or I can't make the sound come up or now every thing is erased - can you find my data!?
ITS.JUST.GONE!
All.OF.IT!
CAN YOUF FIND IT LIKE THEY DO ON CSI?
CAN YOU COME DOWN NOW?
Please.....and if I've lost something that can't be recovered, the tears start....I always have tissues when IT stars crying. They may still have my picture at everybody's workstation!
I'm going to really try to teach myself, contact Geek Squad when necessary, and "depend on the kindness of strangers".
Wish me luck!
lol
Ohhh he wants it does he, well how does it feel to want? And not get!!! Get used to it zero.
“Are you sexually active? If so, do you have one partner, multiple partners or same-sex partners?”
Perfect answer to that question would be to reply ‘yes’, then rattle of a bizarre list of things that would make no sense at all.
“Why yes, yes I am. Mostly with car tires, but sometimes tractor tires are a nice change of pace. Wagon wheels sound like like fun, but are very expensive and getting hard to find, so I’ve never tried that.”
I don’t like to brag.
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