‘Are you sexually active? If so, with one partner, multiple partners or same-sex partners?”
The obvious answer to these questions is: It’s none of your damned business.
But these are questions that your doctor may soon be asking you.
Betsy MsCaughey writes at the New York Post:
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.
“This is nasty business,” says New York cardiologist Dr. Adam Budzikowski. He called the sex questions “insensitive, stupid and very intrusive.” He couldn’t think of an occasion when a cardiologist would need such information — but he knows he’ll be pushed to ask for it.
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.
Embarrassing though it may be, you confide things to a doctor you wouldn’t tell anyone else. But this is entirely different.
This is different because doctors who don’t snoop and record your answers electronically will face financial penalties from Medicare and Medicaid.
The Department of Health and Human Services has set aside around $12.7 billion for incentives for your doctor to put this personal information in your electronic file.
This means that all your private information—including drug use, even if you are long past it—could be available to a government bureaucrat with, as McCaughey puts it, one click of a mouse.
McCaughey urges patients to ask their doctors to keep two sets of books: one in the office with relevant information for treating the patient and a second for the electronic records to which government will have access. I hope you find it as shocking as I do that we could be forced to lie if we want to maintain our privacy about intimate matters.