Obamacare will question your s x x life......
‘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.
“This is nasty business,” says New York cardiologist Dr. Adam Budzikowski. He called the s x x 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.
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.
Dr. Richard Amerling, a nephrologist and associate professor 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 new 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 who don’t use the one-click electronic system, the law is violating Americans’ medical privacy.
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. That’s impractical for most people.
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.
But 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 a woman’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 pertaining to your treatment, ask your doctor about keeping two sets of books so that your secret stays in the office. Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath seriously and won’t be offended.
Are such precautions paranoid? Hardly. WikiLeaker Bradley Manning showed how incompetent the government is at keeping its own secrets; incidents where various agencies accidentally disclose personal data like Social Security numbers are legion. And that’s not to mention the ways in which commercial databases are prone to hacking and/or exploitation.
Be careful about sharing your medical secrets with Uncle Sam.

^^^

Bought to you by the same intellectual genius (Betsy McCaughey) who was behind Sarah Palin's thoroughly debunked, and widely derided, "Obama Death Panel" claim.

I guess it will keep the right-wingnuts hyperventilating for a while, until it is also exposed as the nonsense it is.

jackspratt wrote:^^^

Bought to you by the same intellectual genius (Betsy McCaughey) who was behind Sarah Palin's thoroughly debunked, and widely derided, "Obama Death Panel" claim.

I guess it will keep the right-wingnuts hyperventilating for a while, until it is also exposed as the nonsense it is.

Gosh, you mean that death panel business wasn't true??

Next thing you know, someone will say that Michelle Bachmann was off-base by saying the Muslim Brotherhood was responsible for 9-11 or that HPV vaccine causes mental retardation.
The same people who want to keep medical records in the dinosaur age want to keep voting machines with levers. Imagine that! One click of the mouse and your medical history is in the wrong hands. Next time I go to the hospital, I'll bring a vial of lemon juice for the doctor to use in notating my records.

parrot wrote: Gosh, you mean that death panel business wasn't true??

Apparently not.

But the birth certificate, Benghazi and IRS are absolutely true. I know this from reading Udon Map forum.

A few political cartoons, reflective of US political humor...


ATB

President Obama doin a pretty damn fine job...

ATB

LYM:

I'd say the use of drones in Pakistan has now proven to be a major coup by President Obama...

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/24/polit ... hpt=ias_c2


ATB

ROFLMAO:

Hiring in U.S. Kicks Into Higher Gear as Unemployment Plunges to 6.3% =D> =D>
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-0 ... -6-3-.html

"the jobless rate plunged to the lowest since the collapse of Lehman Brothers." Lehman Brothers happened under Bush and Obama has succeeded in cleaning up that mess despite unprecedented Republican opposition to ANY solutions he proposed, including their own.

Silly thread. Reality is proving just how silly.

I understand that the new jobs being created in the US are largely low paying jobs such as in fast food businesses and Walmart. I also understand that there is some but only a little improvement in better paying jobs. I think the US middle class is really struggling. I note social mobility in the US is very low compared to other western countries and that it's much more a case of who your parents were in the US than your talents. That's much more likely to determine your success in life. The US is a very class ridden society. I discourage Thais I meet from thinking the US is the place to get ahead. The current evidence is that it is not.

I don't think Obama is dead in the water. I think it's critical for the US that his presidency is a success. After the huge mess he inherited from Bush, if Obama leaves the US worse off Americans are seriously up the creek.

As a foreigner I have usually regarded the right in the US as communists. They have a record of big government deficits and favours to the wealthy. I regard George Bush as a communist. He declared war on a few hundred or thousand vicious criminals and spent billions or trillions fighting them on the credit card. He and Dick weren't man enough to hike taxes for his so called wars even in a time of relative economic prosperity. "War" just legitimizes the enemy. Ask Margaret Thatcher's ghost.

It's a difficult question for me but I consider myself an old fashioned Republican. I'm not a natural friend of Barry but given the extremely stupid Congress he's dealing with I give him a B+ to A. I give Congress a F-.

In my view the US government should be looking after main street and not the titans of industry. Barry isn't dead in the water. I think KD is correct.

I think one big problem for the Republicans is that they aren't an attractive party to Hispanic voters.

I also think it's actually Tory supporters who get most of the government benefits both in terms of favourable tax rules and direct government transfers and expenditure. Governments typically spend a fortune on old people. The main reason for this is that they vote. Young adults and the poor are far less likely to vote.

I cringe when middle class welfare is introduced because it becomes very difficult for any party to get rid of it as the middle class vote. Politicians are rarely brave enough to roll this kind of welfare back. It seems to me that in country after country the poor have been kicked more and more in recent decades. That will keep happening if they aren't voting. Governments tend to find it easy to roll back welfare for the poor. I don't think this kind of welfare is much of an issue as it's currently so easy to unwind. It is an issue in my view in the sense that the governments should promote a society where talented people born on the wrong side of the tracks have the opportunity to fulfil their talents.

I tend to see Tory governments as pretty much the same as the other mob - they promote welfare for their supporters. Cripes I understand that the Tea Party representatives in the US didn't even vote to roll back welfare for large agricultural corporations. That shouldn't be difficult.

Looks like the Tea Party is doing very poorly in the '14 elections...

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/2 ... html?hp=t1

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/us/te ... .html?_r=0

Unseating an entrenched politician of any party has always been a difficult task. If you think the Tea Party (Taxed Enough Already) activist have not shook up the Republican landscape you have not been paying attention. As for Republican not reaching out to the Hispanic base you can not be serious? Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Raul Labrador are all Republican front runners for the Presidency. The fact that America is on the tipping point of more voters being net tax recipients vs net tax payers is a concerning reality. The hard left living on ill gotten disability claims and underfunded union pensions should be more concerned. Penalizing production has its costs as well the public purse will dry up and the current lifestyle of many leftist expats will rightfully end.

Republicans officially determine and concede that Benghazi always was a red herring and utter BS:

Benghazi consulate attack: Report clears US response
http://m.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30155216

Those on this thread peddling Benghazi conspiracies are officially mindless, gullible, [other word for donkey] now. =D>

no KD, perhaps the road the far right ran down wildly was a Red Herring, but "Benghazi" was not. Four people died, in my opinion needlessly.. Those within the State Department responsible for bad security decisions got a Thai style punishment, essentially moved to inactive positions. Others at higher levels (Patrick F. Kennedy Administrative guru "M" for State") who turned down additional security support (prior to the attack) never was censured.. The armed Diplomatic Security Agents who never fired a shot at the attackers were branded "heroes" by State. The initial response of the Administration was utterly ridiculous... But, all said, the Republicans have beaten the horse endlessly and there really no need for the House Select Committee and Trey Goudy to waste much more time on it.