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.”
Female Doctor: “ Sir, you will have to stop masturbating.”
Patient: “Why?”
Female Doctor: “Because I am trying to exam you.”
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*snicker*
So, practice in front of your mirror, bored face, shrug shoulders, speak: "I dunno".
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*snicker*
When they ask me questions like that they leave themselves open to some wild answers.
Ask me if I am sexually active and I will ask them if they are making me an offer.
Marriage is serious business. Way too many people put far more thought into buying a car than in selecting a spouse.
And nothing cheapens marriage more than homo marriage.
I’d settle for just his past history. 6 years and the frauds in the socialist democrat party are still pretending he was eligible to run. Birth Certificate, SS# and Draft Card all as phony as a three dollar bill. But, Shh, it’s mean to bring up this fact because he’s OF COLOR.
communist democrats seem to be as obsessed with sex as much as any teenage male. Obviously they never grew up.
Let my female PA ask those questions of me on my next visit, she will regret it.
Don’t make yourself a target by responding FU...
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What if you were treated for a drug problem years ago but say "no" to drugs now, what happens? Maybe the drugs were years and years ago and the question is about current use. Will they go through your whole report to make sure there are no discrepancies?
What if you forget something; accidentally leave something out?
Yeah. I got it;-{)
Well, doctor, I get screwed every day. By the Federal government.
yawn!!....tell them anything that comes to your mind....if your situation is a yes, then frame your answer as a no....
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*snicker*
Doctor please, I hope you are talking about dinner and a movie first!
And we don’t want his...
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Do the college years count, because that's going to make a difference.
Heh.........
Obama probably figures that within a few weeks this policy will identify an additional 4,373 Clinton bimbos that his peeps will be able to throw back at Hillary in ‘16.
What if you carry an awesomely strong magnet with you and set it next to the electronic device. Rub the magnet around when the doctor leaves the room.
“I’m sorry, you are not authorized to know that information.”
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I'm sorry, but I just don't remember.
No, I don't remember that either.
No, I'm drawing a blank.
Guess all that info is gone because so much important stuff has taken its place.
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*snicker*
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*chortle*
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