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.”
OOOOH, kinky! They LOVE that! < /sarc >
So now Obama is our proctologist in chief? Well, it’s none of his damned business. Some nerve the left has, criticizing others for moralizing while supporting something like this.
I think B.O. set up an email or web cite for people (snitches) to rat out on friends, family, coworkers, etc. if they had heard them say anything negative about the government/Obama.
More data just awaiting ultimate collation with the ‘care provided’ portion of the database.
The answer to the gun question is "If you want the answer to that question, try breaking in to my house some night".
LOL ....
My answer will be similarly uncooperative if Barky’s on-scene rep starts asking questions like, “So, ummm, uhh, so what would you say your stance is?”
If you don't think that CERTAIN people, like Republicans will NOT get the help that democrats get you are fooling yourself. They KNOW how we VOTE!
LOL
Not interested. Unlike Bacrock, I don’t give Lewinsky’s.
Took an elderly relative to the doc today. Asked the nurse what kind of mood the doc was in and she said he seemed a little “overwhelmed” lately with all the data/recordkeeping he is having to deal with. He told her he “didn’t go to medical school for all those years to be a secretary” (he’s a highly skilled surgeon). I told him at the end of the appointment that he had my empathy/sympathy for all the cr@p he was having to deal with .... he said the only time he doesn’t have to deal with it is “in the operating room and even that is starting to get bureaucratic”. He and his staff hate Obamacare .... the patients will be hating it shortly.
While examining my relative, who wears a hearing aid, the aid started making a loud constant ringing sound .... the doc looked up and said “are you connecting to the NSA?” I almost fell on the floor laughing.
“At this point, what difference does it make?!”
I'll show him mine if he shows me his.
Doctor (Female of course), “Are you sexually active?”
Me, “Are you offering??
My point is that if you fill out a form in 2014 and you respond “No” to a question, it is highly unlikely that anyone is going to scan 20 or 30 years of each individual’s medical records to validate that answer.
Starting from the 4th century?
Only using someone else's equipment!
I got the same nonsense from a doctor in Minnesota - a place where I no longer live. I was racing bicycles at the time, and my record said that I did absolutely no exercise, and had all sorts of cardiac problems to the point where I could not walk across a room. The nanny doc even continued to call after I moved to Texas, claiming that I needed the help of that particular clinic network (Fairview Health Network in Minnesota), no one in Texas was qualified, and a bunch of nonsense that I would not be able to find a job in Texas. It was applied rather thick.
My response was not just to the Fairview Health Network, but also to several licensing boards. I no longer recognize any professional license issued by the State of Minnestoopid. Not in the medical profession. Not in engineering. Not even to cut hair.
Not any more.
The old vacuum crts used rapidly changing magnetic fields to scan the picture onto the screen.
A magnet would mess up where the electrons landed, causing color shifting.
Most sets had builtin degaussers to correct for most normal problems.
A magnet brought onto the screen might cause a repairman to show up at your house with a MUCH stronger demagnetizer than the one built in.
Today's flat displays do not operate in the same manner.
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