Obamacare And Your Credit Card

                                                           

Good morning, dear readers.  

You know that letter you get once a year from your credit card issuer? ...the one with all the fine print about how they share your credit info?  Well, you might want to read it closely the next time it shows up in your mailbox.  (Keep in mind that, unless you opt out, banks and credit card issuers are free to share your credit behavior, and even sell it to other agencies.

Why am I even bringing this up?  Well it seems that Bloomberg reported last week that doctors are now subscribing to a service that will provide them with information about what you are buying with those credit cards!  Sound far fetched?  Read on:

The Obamacare program has already mandated that doctors and hospitals will no longer be paid for procedures they deem expensive and wasteful.  Stuff like MRI's and Cat Scans and expensive blood tests.  Nor will your doctor get reimbursed for referring you to a specialist.  Instead, Obama has mandated that the doctors keep you healthy or pay the price.

So doctors now are signing up for a consumer service that will provide them with a report of your credit card activity in order to see if you're dining on fast food, partying it up in your neighborhood bar, fattening yourself up at the Golden Corral Buffet or if you have taken up skydiving.

According to Bloomberg's Sharyn Pettypiece “Now they don’t get paid for how many tests or services they provide, they get paid by keeping you healthy, that’s part of the reason why they’re so interested in this consumer data.”

It's called "data mining", something that Target and Amazon already employ in order to tempt buyers to partake of their wares.   Except in this case,  your doctor wants to know if you're not "getting with his program" and become a liability to his own income.  And if you think you can escape this process, think again.  With Obama's insistence that all medical records be kept digitally and available to any and all, any doc can refuse to take you in if he finds you have a fetish for Big Macs and strawberry shakes.

Per Bloomberg:

"For doctors, this is just good business. Keeping track of their patients and preventing them from health catastrophes supplies doctors with their paycheck.

“The U.S. has begun levying fines on hospitals that have too many patients readmitted within a month and rewarding hospitals that fare well against clinical benchmarks and on patient surveys,” Bloomberg reported.

Idealists might say Obamacare forces doctors to take the Hippocratic Oath seriously and make their patients’ health an absolute priority instead of making checklists of things to do – like screenings and annual checkups – in order to get paid.

The Heritage Foundation espouses a different view. If the government is in charge of financing health care and not the patients, then it will have a hard time keeping the patients’ best interests in mind."

Isn't all this just wonderful news?