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.”
Elections have consequences and the LIVs (low-information voters) and cheats who got this commie thug elected and re-elected are getting what their ignorance demands!!
Don’t want to answer these questions? Vote smarter next time.
Usually the strategy in a case such as this, is the skew the data so that it is unusable. That would probably mean doing something that Hussein 0bama and his regime do on a daily basis - lie. Something along the lines of "I wanted to try to break Wilt Chamberlain's record of 20,000 sex partners" should do.
Ok, Ok, it was an veiled Airplane! reference.
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Huh...................?
Gonna be a boring history for them. Only ever slept with my husband who I am now married to (18 years), no affairs, and yeah we still have sex. DUH.
Last year we had to go through STD testing for IVF and the lab workers got really upset because we were making jokes the whole time.
Mentor or partner?
I started lying to my doctors a couple years ago.
Got that miz NSA puke?!
I think the entire voting public ought to know just how sick little Barry really is.
So many good answers
Sexually active? No, I'm married.
Sexually active? Usually, but sometimes I just lay there.
same-sex partners? Yes, all of my partners are the same sex.
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If caught, I bet there is a stiff penalty for doctor and patient for keeping two books.
Probably not a penalty. A tax. A tax on keeping secrets from Big Bro'.
In future medical appointments, I'm going to whisper my medical information. I'll give the doctor a note that we have to whisper in case there is a "bug" in the office.
I'm going to have to remember those!
The doctors themselves don’t ask questions. You fill out page after page of these questions yourself.
I wonder what a N/A answer would get you? Or just lie.
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If it is their 2012 report, why haven't they been yelling from the rooftops.
Its only a couple of weeks before the magic date: October 1, 2013.
And, these protesters....I guess better late than never but where were these people as the bill was being proposed? Where was "anonymous?"
Where were the Guy Fawkes demonstrators. Maybe I just missed them.
I guess if there are constant, incessant demonstrations about the new rules, maybe somethings can still be done....
So, HIPPA (sic?) is gone?
Anybody surprised by this is utterly clueless!
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Will there be polygraph examiners there to test if the patient is telling the truth on any of the questions?
Does sex with prostitutes in foreign countries count?
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