Originally published September 20 2013
Obamacare to force doctors to ask highly intrusive questions about patients' sex lives
by J. D. Heyes
(NaturalNews) There have been previous reports about the invasiveness of the Affordable Care Act and that, despite Fourth Amendment privacy protections and privacy laws like HIPAA, Americans' personal medical information was nonetheless going to be digitized, stuck in another huge government database and misused by bureaucrats.
Now comes word that all of your personal medical information isn't enough: Under the auspices of Obamacare, the government is now going to want every intimate detail about your sex life.
Betsy McCaughey, author of the book, Beating Obamacare, revealed as much in a recent column:
'Are you sexually active? If so, with one partner, multiple partners or same-sex partners?"
Be ready to answer those questions and more the next time you go to the doctor, whether it's the dermatologist or the cardiologist and no matter if the questions are unrelated to why you're seeking medical help. And you can thank the Obama health law.
And just so you know, Obama doesn't care about your privacy
Doctors, believe it or not, are as furious as you likely are.
"This is nasty business," New York cardiologist Dr. Adam Budzikowski tells McCaughey. He went on to label the sex questions "insensitive, stupid and very intrusive." And what's more, as a cardiologist, he said that he couldn't think of a single occasion when he would need such information. But just the same, he knows Big Brother will be pushing him to ask for it.
Well, can't doctors just opt out? Perhaps - but the deviant sickos who passed this law thought of that. So they built in financial "incentives" for doctors and hospitals to ensure their compliance.
More from McCaughey:
Doctors and hospitals who don't comply with the federal government's electronic-health-records requirements forgo incentive payments now; starting in 2015, they'll face financial penalties from Medicare and Medicaid. The Department of Health and Human Services has already paid out over $12.7 billion for these incentives.
These measures, sold as "reforms" by a dishonest president and an equally dishonest Democrat majority, are going to turn doctors into government stooges. The financial pressure aims to force them into asking patients questions that they would not normally ask, and which the government has no business asking. Not only that, but the law's requirements force doctors to violate their Hippocratic Oath, which they take very seriously.
And questions about sex and other intimate behaviors are highly personal; as such, they should be highly confidential.
McCaughey says Dr. Richard Amerling, a nephrologist and associate professor at Albert Einstein Medical College, tells her that a patient's medical record should only be "a story created by you and your doctor solely for your treatment and benefit." The new Obamacare requirements, however, are transforming 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," McCaughey writes. "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."
But you know what? The president doesn't care what you think. He and his administration are ignoring protests from you and from privacy advocates who say such divulging of personal medical information is not simply a blatant constitutional violation but an abuse of privacy laws.
Pay cash and ask your doc to keep two sets of books
There is one way out of this privacy trap. The Department of Health and Human Services - the bureaucracy charged with writing rules specified in the law - announced on Jan. 17 that patients who want to keep something intimate out of their electronic medical record should just pay cash. But of course, not everyone can do that.
"Where are the women's rights groups that went to the barricades in the 1980s and 1990s to prevent the federal government from accessing a woman's health records? Hypocritically, they are silent now," McCaughey said.
Besides the "pay cash" option - which is becoming a trend among more private practitioners - you can also ask your doctor to keep two sets of records, McCaughey says, so you can keep your medical privacy.
"Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath seriously and won't be offended," she wrote.
Sources:
http://www.nypost.com
http://www.businessinsider.com
http://www.money.msn.com
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