Read this article http://nypost.com/2013/09/15/obamacare-will-question-your-sex-life/ that talks of the questions to be asked with obamacare and how this information will be stored. I'm a big girl and think I can handle myself with it, but I realize that some serious talks will need to go on with my children before any doctor visits..... What are your thoughts and concerns with this?
Hm. I guess it's been a while since I've been to the doctor for a check up, but I thought they asked those sorts of questions anyway. I mean, some of those behaviors are (can be) risky from a health stand point. Not that I want my beeswax shared with the government. I'm just saying that my doctor asking me those questions wouldn't surprise me.
I actually read that yesterday. And, yes, doctors should ask those types of questions when it is age appropriate. It is not any of the government's business. I will prepare my kids though.
What is disturbing is that if I go in for a hang nail, the foot doctor has to ask me these very private questions. Age appropriate or not, if it doesn't pertain to the medical need at the time of the appointment, it shouldn't be asked. I do not care if some of the behaviors could be risky. If I want to have a weekly orgy, masterbate until the cows come home, and then go to a friend's house for a swinging party with a bunch of men who are carrying Gonorrhea, Syphilis, and AIDS, then on my way home, stop by Vegas to sell myself on the street corner, IT IS STILL NONE OF THE GOVERNMENTS BUSINESS! Does answering these questions make risky sexual habits less risky? It is pure invasion of privacy, and I believe it is so the government can regulate the people, not because they have our best interest at heart. Parental Rights sent out notices to parents regarding this issue. While the doctor has to share their information that is "on the record", under doctor patient priviledges, doctors still have to honor their oath of confidentiality (we will see :roll. So, we can share information with them "off the record", but we need to make it clear that it is not to be shared with the government. It is also suggested that parents discuss with their children what to answer and what not to answer while they are visiting the doctor. While the government might be intruding on our children, parents still have rights to tell their child what they should and shouldn't share.
I should clarify that I do think those questions should be asked only when relevant to the illness. My dd12 has had some personal questions because she has had trouble with ovarian cysts and periods. That was appropriate. My older daughter was asked the same type questions by a dermatologist when she was 11. That was not appropriate, and I let that be known. I was told I was naive.
‘Are you sexually active? If so, with one partner, multiple partners or same-sex partners?” What if everyone answered like this whether male or female. Yes With the president. Multiple? well more like serial really, they only have one in office at a time. Not sure, I cannot decide if "he" is really a man or just ANOTHER someone with a cigar.
Patty I almost wet my pants you made me laugh so hard! Then followed up by the answers given. Oh my.. Glad I read it in the day and not while the kids were sleeping. We only go to the doctor for major medical stuff, now we have another reason to avoid them. UGG!
There's another aspect to invasiveness. Maybe I can draw a parallel with what happened to student loans (part of the same healthcare act, ironically, because that's how the party in power decided to push it through!). The government took over the student loan business. Instead of receiving loan information from banks, we started receiving statements etc. from the government. There was one major difference: The government insists on using your social security number as your account number. Now this is totally against all best practices, because it means your SSN appears on everything. All someone needs to do is to steal a statement from your mailbox and they have your SSN, your address, and so on. I complained to their help line about this and was simply fobbed off. I don't know for sure whether the government will use SSN for all things healthcare. If they do, though, they will be putting us at much greater risk for identity theft and the like.
From factcheck.org Q: Will doctors be required to ask patients questions about their sexual history under the Affordable Care Act? A: No. A program created by the stimulus law – not Obamacare — encourages health professionals to use electronic records. But there is no requirement in the program to ask anything about sexual history. FULL QUESTION As a requirement of the ACA, will doctors be required to ask questions related to patients’ sexual activities, even if they are not related to the office visit? Will doctors be penalized financially for not obtaining the information? FULL ANSWER The false claim that doctors will be required to ask questions about their patients’ sex lives originated in a Sept. 15 New York Post op-ed written by Obamacare critic Betsy McCaughey. (Our readers may remember McCaughey as the source of the bogus claim that health care legislation in the House called for mandatory counseling for seniors “to do what’s in society’s best interest … and cut your life short.”) Her op-ed, headlined “Obamacare will question your sex life,” claims that “[t]he president’s ‘reforms’ aim to turn doctors into government agents, pressuring them financially to ask questions they consider inappropriate and unnecessary.” McCaughey, Sept. 15: “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. But that’s false. McCaughey says these questions are part of government requirements for health care professionals to receive incentive payments for using electronic health records. But doctors are not required to ask these questions in order to receive such payments, and the incentive program wasn’t part of the Affordable Care Act. The Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Records (EHR) Incentive Programs were created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (also known as the stimulus act). Under the stimulus legislation, the incentive programs were set up to “promote the adoption of EHRs [electronic health records] in support of the ultimate goals of improving the quality of patient care and reducing health costs,” says a fact sheet from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The incentive programs provide payments through Medicare and Medicaid to eligible health care professionals and hospitals as they “adopt, implement, upgrade or demonstrate meaningful use of certified EHR technology,” according to CMS. President Obama and his predecessor, President George W. Bush, have pushed for wider adoption of electronic health records to improve care and lower costs by helping to reduce medical errors, eliminate duplicate tests, coordinate care and enable patients to get copies of their records easily. When he was campaigning for president, Obama cited a Rand Corp. study that said $77 billion per year could be saved with widespread use of EHRs. The Congressional Budget Office was critical of that study, and a 2013 Rand analysis said data on the impact of EHRs were “mixed.” It said the “disappointing performance” in terms of cost savings so far was due to slow adoption of the technology and the inability of some systems to communicate with one another. Under the stimulus act’s incentive programs, doctors could receive up to $44,000 in incentive payments over five years under the Medicare program, and up to $63,750 over six years under the Medicaid program. Most hospitals can participate in both programs, but doctors and health care professionals have to pick one. In order to receive the payments, health care professionals have to demonstrate “meaningful use” of electronic health records, and there are several requirements. Asking about sexual activities isn’t one of them, according to CMS. A spokesperson told us : Rachel Maisler, CMS spokesperson, Sept. 18: Betsy McCaughey’s article is grossly inaccurate. Under no circumstances would your doctor or health care provider be required to ask you about your sexual activity or partners to demonstrate meaningful use to receive an EHR incentive payment. McCaughey wrote that Adam Budzikowski, a New York cardiologist, “knows he’ll be pushed to ask” his patients sexual questions that he called “insensitive, stupid and very intrusive.” We spoke with Budzikowski, who told us that “at the end of the day, there will be financial penalties for not reporting these quality measures.” He told us he finds the questions “unpleasant.” But we found that these questions are not part of the “quality measures” that doctors can report to CMS in order to receive incentive payments. After researching the issue, we called Budzikowski with follow-up questions, but he has not yet returned our call. There are two stages of the EHR Incentive Programs: First, eligible health care professionals and hospitals would meet requirements in Stage 1, and in later years, Stage 2. In Stage 1, doctors and other health care providers can demonstrate meaningful use by recording health information electronically. They must meet several objectives (14 core objectives and five out of 10 other objectives), such as using electronic prescription orders, maintaining a list of current diagnoses, maintaining a medication list and medication allergy list, recording patients’ vital signs, and recording the demographic information of patients. These demographics include preferred language, gender, race, ethnicity and date of birth. Doctors also must protect electronic health information. The second stage requires doctors to meet further requirements, such as communicating with patients through secure electronic messages and providing them with clinical summaries, recording data on lab tests, and being able to submit information to immunizations registries. Doctors and other health care providers must meet 17 core objectives and three out of six other objectives. Catherine DesRoches, a senior survey researcher with Mathematica Policy Research, is an expert on health information technology and oversees a study on the meaningful use of such technology. She told us that she was very familiar with the Stage 1 and Stage 2 requirements, and that “there’s nothing in there that requires physicians to ask about sexual history.” DesRoches says it’s possible electronic records could be customized to include fields for such questions for doctors who regularly ask about sexual history. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were records that allowed you to do that,” she said. Health care professionals also must report a number of clinical quality measures. There are 64 clinical quality measures to choose from in Stage 2, and doctors must report on nine. Quality measures require doctors to report aggregate data on a wide variety of health topics. For example, doctors can report the “percentage of women 40-69 years of age who had a mammogram to screen for breast cancer.” Or doctors could choose to report the percentage of patients receiving an influenza immunization. We looked through all 64 quality measures and the only one related to sexual activity was a measure of the percentage of women aged 16 to 24 who were “identified as sexually active” and had been screened for chlamydia. Again, doctors pick nine out of the 64 quality measures to report. Moreover, CMS told us that no personally identifiable information about patients is being collected by the government for this program. Providers attest that they have met the meaningful use objectives and measures using aggregate data. – by Justin Cohen, with Lori Robertson Sources McCaughey, Betsy. “Obamacare will question your sex life.” New York Post. 15 Sep 2013. EHR Incentive Programs. CMS.gov. accessed 24 Sep 2013. More than Half of Doctors Now Use Electronic Health Records Thanks to Administration Policies. WhiteHouse.gov. accessed 24 Sep 2013. Additional Information Regarding EP Clinical Quality Measures for 2014 EHR Incentive Programs. CMS.gov. accessed 24 Sep 2013. Eligible Professional Meaningful Use Table of Contents Core and Menu Set Objectives Stage 1. CMS.gov. accessed 24 Sep 2013. Stage 2 Eligible Professional (EP) Meaningful Use Core and Menu Measures Table of Contents. CMS.gov. accessed 24 Sep 2013. How to Attain Meaningful Use. HealthIT.gov. accessed 24 Sep 2013. Medicare and Medicaid Programs; Electronic Health Record Incentive Program. FederalRegister.gov. accessed 24 Sep 2013. A Record of Progress on Health Information Technology. CMS.gov. 23 Apr 2013. Spokesperson, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Emails sent to FactCheck.org. 18 and 23 Sep 2013. Henig, Jess and Lori Robertson. “Obama’s Inflated Health ‘Savings.’” FactCheck.org. 16 Jun 2008. Kellermann, Arthur L. and Spencer S. Jones. “What It Will Take to Achieve the As-Yet-Unfulfilled Promises of Health Information Technology.” RAND Corporation. Jan 2013. Budzikowski, Adam. Interview with FactCheck.org. 17 Sep 2013. DesRoches, Catherine, senior survey researcher, Mathematica Policy Research. Interview with FactCheck.org. 1 Oct 2013.
Well that debunks that particular myth! There's so much scaremongering right now among all sides of the debate that it's really difficult to know what to believe.
I seriously don't know why everyone is so upset about the ACA. It passed. Let it be. If it needs to be fixed once it is in place, we fix it. Don't shut down the government and default on loans because you don't like a legitimately passed law. Some members of Congress don't seem to understand how Congress is supposed to work.
But in fairness, the president has been granting waivers to big business, to unions, and to others without, some would say, the authority to do so. As you say, the law passed, so the president doesn't have the right to unilaterally change it. This is what has tempted Congress to leverage the budget impasse to give individuals the same one-year break as the others. That's the constitutional way to do things. Mind you, I still think it's stupid to put the entire economy at risk by linking it to the debt limit. Right now, politicians appear to be out of control. If the entire world economy goes down the tubes because of this, we'll be loathed by many countries around the globe. At this point, I'd rather let the ACA play out. Let the voters decide next year whether or not it's a success. And stop granting waivers to powerful interest groups.
Yes. The president has changed the law to suit himself. The law being implemented is not the law that was passed.
That's why we have checks and balances. If someone truly thinks he is doing something wrong, take it to the courts.
But the checks and balances only work when the Constitution is being followed. And it was abandoned long ago. And that is something we can't place on any one party. Both chose to ignore it, and then fuss when their opponent does likewise.
