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.”
“Yes, doctor ... I have a very active sex life .... but I can’t prove it ... there aren’t any witnesses.”
Patient: “INFREQUENTLY.”
Doctor (taking notes): “Is that one or two words, sir?”
More LOVE-INT for Congress and the NSA
but they are exempt as are THEIR Staff
and THEIR mistresses and EVERYONE in
their Mosques and Harems (Moslems are not under ObamaCARE).
America is gone. al Qaeda is in charge.
Congress is drunk, whoring, and hated beyond their belief.
Which HHS would positively love; then they can shut down that office or monitor it heavier; to keep citizens safe you understand....
I don't know how much I'd want to know about his relationship with "Frank", what with the underwear stains and all.
Well, socialists are historically puritanical after the revolution. I’m not surprised that wildly sexually active people are going to be targeted for purge, lol!
Well, I can’t get into too much detail, but I do recall getting bent over twice recently: November 2008 and November 2012. Does that help?
As part of the Pre-Cana marriage preparation classes required to get married in the Catholic Church, my bride and I were at one point separated and asked a series of questions intended to establish our legitimacy and sincerity.
A nun actually looked me straight in the eye and asked, “Are you willing to have intercourse with this woman?”
Unable to resist, I flashed her a few quizzical looks, looked up at the ceiling, down at the floor, and then back at her before asking “Sister, may I please have a few minutes to think about that?”
Had to go to Confession later as they practically had to call the paramedics to come and revive her.
How about your dermatologist?
Or, your Santeria healer?/s
OBAMA WANTS YOUR SEXUAL HISTORY
That’s a book with just one chapter, likely not interesting to anyone else. Two virgins on their wedding day, about to celebrate 30 years next month.
Mine would be a leaflet, about the size of “Jewish Sports Legends.”
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What if you are having one of those 4-hour Viagra mishaps.....heh...
I was asked that on my last annual physical. I responded, “Do wet dreams count? Then the answer is yes. I had two wet dreams last night and I would have had a third except I fell asleep.”
Once the real medical conversation got focused on Type this and Leve that I stopped caring about the nonsense. My docs now know that my stock answer to questions about guns or sex is “Super-Soaker!”. Grins all around.
Just give wrong answers. For instance, for sexually active, answer “with animalls only”. For drug usage, “only since Elmer Fudd’s been in office”. For firearms, “muskets in use during Revolutionary War”. For religious questions, “I am a Mayan priest and I’m looking for a human sacrifice”.
That’ll mess up the NSA computers.
Or, "At this point, what difference does it make?"
... and every April 15th.
It’ll just get your records a psych review and subsequent gun confiscation.
Think of how it would throw a wrench into the works if everybody did that! I’m going to do my part.
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