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Doctors Now Use Credit Card Data To Spy On You Because Of Obamacare

Kate Patrick Contributor
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Doctors are now using your credit card data to track your lifestyle habits so they can determine how likely you are to get sick. Their motivation comes from Obamacare, according to Bloomberg.

“Under Obamacare, they (doctors) really want to keep you healthy,” Bloomberg’s Shannon Pettypiece said in an interview. “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.”

Pettypiece describes how businesses like Target and Amazon already use credit card data as an advertising tool. Doctors are going to use the data to try and tell you how to live if they think you’re indulging in unhealthy habits, like eating pizza or going skydiving.

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.

“A key goal of health care reform should be the restoration of the traditional doctor–patient relationship,” Alyene Senger wrote on Heritage’s website. “In such a relationship, physicians would be the key decision makers in the delivery of care, and patients would be the key decision makers in the financing of care. This cannot be achieved unless and until patients, not the government, control health care dollars and decisions, and third-party insurance executives are directly accountable to individuals and families, who really pay the health care bills.”

As a result of new health care regulations introduced by Obamacare, doctors must find new ways to do their job, even if it means snooping around in their patients’ business.

But the fact remains: doctors are now joining the NSA in a noble mission to “keep you safe.”

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Tags : obamacare
Kate Patrick