Comment: The article below has been criticized for not being truthful. Obamacare’s supporters are given to attacking every little thing hypertechnically wrong in what their opponents say, even if it’s irrelevant to the greater issue at hand.
The article asserts “you can thank the Obama health law” for the intrusive questions your doctor will be asking you about your sex life.
Obamacare by itself may not bring about this result, but the overall design of the new federal electronic health record (EHR) system certainly does. Obamacare is one of the building blocks of that design.
Here are the undeniable facts:
Money for electronic health records was included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the “stimulus bill”) early in Obama’s presidency. As a result of this Act, large government contracts were let to construct the federal EHR system. Obviously, the radical Democrats were looking ahead to Obamacare.
The HiTech Act portion of this first building block provided $19.2 billion in funding for hospitals and physician practices to get them to move toward the federal EHR system centralized in Washington.
The HiTech Act offered incentives to doctors who become “meaningful users” of EHRs. After a certain date, the incentives switch to penalties, to be imposed on physicians and hospitals who are not “meaningful users” of EHRs.
Starting in phase one of meaningful use, doctors must use software approved by the federal government to collect and enter into an electronic record information about each patient’s family history, social history, medical treatments etc. The software is the second building block in the overall design to give Washington total access to your medical information. Many of the requirements for controlling doctors are in the software, not in legislative language.
The patient medical record form embedded in the government-certified software program asks intrusive questions about your sexual history. Intrusive questions include:
Sexual History
Not sexually active
Sexually active with one partner
Sexually active with more than one partner
Same sex partner
In other words, Washington wants to know if you are promiscuous and/or gay.
To avoid penalties, doctors must “attest” every six months that they are meaningful users and following the software, even though there are doctors who find it unnecessary and counterproductive to ask patients questions about sexual history.
With the passage of Obamacare, another building block of the overall design fell into place. As a result of Obamacare, your personal medical information is sent to Washington. In other words, your sex life is now in your government dossier for Washington to see. That’s new. Moreover, Obamacare authorizes multiple government agencies to share your sexual history and other personal medical information. That’s also new. There was a huge debate in Britain whether personal medical information gathered by the National Health Service could be passed to other agencies. America skipped that debate entirely. Obamacare was rammed down our throats with no public discussion or serious consideration of the privacy issues such sharing engenders. After Obamacare, government agencies can share your personal medical information and sexual history and there’s not much you can do about it without repealing the law.
Taken together, the building blocks (including Obamacare) and the overall design of the federal EHR system mean that people will disclose their sexual history and practices to their doctors – whether pertinent to the purpose of their visit or not – and that information will be transmitted to Washington, where it will be shared among HHS, the IRS, and 160 new government agencies created by Obamacare.
Thus, the Truth Squad concludes that the article below is true in all important respects. Here’s the bottom line: After Obamacare, you will be asked about your sex life if you go to the doctor for so much as a hang-nail. Your conversations with your doctor are no longer private. They will be reported to Washington. Bureaucrats from HHS, the IRS, and Obamacare’s 160 new government agencies are now sitting between you and your doctor, watching you undress and listening in. Remember that when you are deciding which questions you will and will not answer. Answer them all and you are naked and exposed before your government. It’s not supposed to be this way.
As if this weren’t bad enough, it’s foreseeable there will be leaks and political abuses. The IRS will target political candidates it doesn’t like and use their sexual history and other personal information against them, just as by its own admission it has targeted selected groups it doesn’t like in recent months.
To our opponents: You just keep right on focusing on trivia. It’s all you’ve got.
“‘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.”
“The president’s “reforms” aim to turn doctors into government agents, pressuring them financially to ask questions they consider inappropriate and unnecessary, and to violate their Hippocratic Oath to keep patients’ records confidential.”
[…]
“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….”
[…]
“…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 administration is ignoring these protests from privacy advocates. On Jan. 17, HHS announced patients who want to keep something out of their electronic record should pay cash….”
“There’s one question they can’t ask: Thanks to the NRA, Section 2716 of the ObamaCare law bars the federal government from compelling doctors and hospitals to ask you if you own a firearm.”
[…]
“Patients need to defend their own privacy by refusing to answer the intrusive social-history questions….”
[…]
Obamacare will question your sex life
September 15, 2013 | 7:56pm
http://nypost.com/2013/09/15/obamacare-will-question-your-sex-life/