Government Wants To Know How Fat You Are
It looks like the Feds are now going to force health care providers to not only monitor, but report on your body-mass index so that they can “encourcage” you to loose weight. They even put a deadline on receiving ratings from all citizens by 2014. I’m not going to rant to you about how intrusive, and illegal, this is.
Well, okay, yes I will.
Put simply, if this information is gleaned from a private meeting between a care team and a patient, the care team has no right to divulge any information, even at government request. It would take a controversial court order to make anything like that happen against the wishes of any said patient. Care providers cannot in any way shape or form divulge anything about a patient according to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act passed back in 1996.
Plus, the government already has so much information and control over us at this point, I’d rather be a fat ass in protest than be lean and fit and loose all privacy and control for myself.
RandomBrainwork.net 
Your post shows a complete misunderstanding of the program that is designed to address the obesity epidemic in this country that adds over 140 billion a year to health care costs.
Stimulus money is being directed to hospitals and physicians to adopt a cost saving system of electronic health records. To be eligible doctors need to demonstrate they are “meaningful users” of the system. One way they can qualify is to measure a Body Mass Index (BMI)for each patient visit and keep that as a part of the patient’s health record just like blood pressure, temperature, and heart rate.
The private medical records of an individual are not going to be made public. Health records have always been used anonymously to track the rates of disease like diabetes and the BMI will be no different than that.
There is no invasion of privacy. The entire program is designed to encourage physicians to help patients keep track of their BMI and weight in order to promote better overall health. It is hard to see why anyone would have a problem with that.
Government money means government control. I agree that obesity is a problem on a national level. It’s because of the lifestyle of many Americans that they are fat. I don’t see it as the government’s job to have to track the these records, anonymous or not. When the only way a doctor can get payed is by the government, it will be hard for him or her to focus on the real needs of a patient.
I may sound callous, that somehow being fat isn’t a “real” problem. It is. But these government program can end up beng able to dictate how a doctor and patient choose treatments, or can lead to those decisions being taken completely out of the hands of the patient and doctors altogether.
Sorry to disagree Daniel, but having health care decisions taken completely out of the hands of doctor’s and patients simply because the government wants to encourage health care providers to take a quick a BMI at each visit defies logic.
You are creating a fear-based imaginary outcome to this simple well meaning nudge by the government to pay more attention to the obesity epidemic that is costing our nation billions of dollars that has no basis in fact.
Following your logic the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention would stop collecting data on diabetes, cancer, drug abuse, tuberculosis, etc. because it is not the government’s job. That is quite an untenable position to say the least.
Conservatives are constantly complaining about how much money the federal government spends. Suppose that better preventative medicine can significantly reduce medicare costs to treat obesity related diseases in the elderly saving billions of dollars. Wouldn’t you agree that this could benefit the entire nation in the long run?
Suppose that under less regulation, private organizations could have more room to conduct research based on data that doctors and patients provide willingly. This would include deregulating private insurance to allow more competition, the ability to buy across state lines excetera along with Tort reform and it would significantly decrease the cost of healthcare and provide more real options to choose from in case of illness.
1)I would argue that any research done would be just as good, or even more definitive than what the government could produce.
2)It was never the governments place to dip it’s fingers into healthcare as much as it was it’s place to essentially take over much of the auto industry. The more the government is involved in our lives, the less choice we have for ourselves. Plain and simple.
BTW, I enjoy discussing this stuff, even though most of the time I’m at the opposite end of the political spectrum. Thanks for your comments.
What would happen Daniel if you got your way and the Center for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Federal Aviation Administration were all abolished and private industry or the states took over those functions.
You have expanded the discussion to go off the original topic completely. That must mean that you have run out of arguments that are on point.
The issue in your original post was the government encouraging physicians to include BMI records along with pulse, temperature, blood pressure, etc. with each doctor’s visit. Pray tell how does that take away any of your rights and freedoms? You can still be as fat as you like and die prematurely from a number of diseases brought about by obesity, you just can’t blame your doctor for not warning you about it.