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.”
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5 to 10 plus 20 years community service.
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Be sure to take your Passport whenever you go to doctor's office. You should take all relevant info - which should be no info at all.
Patient: “Why?”
Female Doctor: “Because I am trying to exam you.”
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Ha! Can't wait to pass this one along!
Ok. I see he was apparently a staunch consevative. I had no idea. I figured him for a hippy wackjob. mea culpa.
Wiki only says prostate cancer.
Was there something more suspicious than that or was it something suspicious wrt that?
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I keep thinking of the movie 'Gattica' (sic?)........
Every man should claim to have had sex with Michelle
You’re, unfortunately, not far off at all.
Guaranteed within 5 years none of us posting here will be allowed to get any expensive medical care. Regardless of age.
For the older ones their age will be the ‘excuse’. For the rest of us the excuse will be ‘recordkeeping error’.
Which will mysteriously resolve around the time it becomes unnecessary to treat us. Because we’re dead.
Always say “no”.
If later they ask about a perceived discrepancy, tell them it was due to their lack of clarity.
Who the hell would they have checking for discrepancies?
By the time that process is automated, I’ll be long past caring.
As a friend of mine said: “You first! Where have those hands been and should I be worried about your sexual partners?”
What guns? I lost them in a hunting accident. Damn bear ripped everything to shreds.
“Don’t make yourself a target by responding FU...”
A target? Someone threatening me over such question will find I am not a nice guy.
S’ok. They’ll toss your place anyways. Just because they can. Be sure to vacuum in the corners first, MK?
Better have a lot of space and time when interviewing people from the hoods. ;-)
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The computer/laptop they put all of your info in.
A doctor's PA I saw recently was putting in information about my visit and muttered "I hate doing this".
I think she meant it took too much time and was just stupid.
She couldn't see as many patients as she used to because so much time was spent inputing patient info.
Magnets around tv's can really mess them up. Ask my brother what it does - he did this when he and a friend just wanted to see what it would do. They were probably preteen at the time. The colors was so messed up mom and dad either had to get a new set or got the one fixed.
Naturally, my brother and his friend had no idea how it happened.
I'm just wondering if a magnet around a computer would mess up the computer and the information contained within.
LOL!!
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BTTT. Sorry to hear about your dad's situation.
Bet this is going to happen a lot - garbage in, garbage out.
It will happen anyways. Large databases ALWAYS have a percentage error rate. In this case there will be more serious consequences than a higher interest rate if you buy a house.
And it opens the possibility of malicious intent wrongful entries also.
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*chortle*
This thread is fun - kinda' balances out B. Hussein O. mega speech from last night.
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I would't be surprised if the scenario you mentioned was in our future.
Why are Dr.s asking about guns?
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