"Obamacare will question your sex life?"

       I looked at the link for The Tampa Bay Times which publishes a fact-checking piece called “PolitiFact Check.” Through the column researcher Becky Bower, analyzes the supporting data for the arguments made in the articles of other journalists. Her objective is to determine whether the facts they uncover are accurate. Rather than research the databases for accuracy I chose to analyze the claims of the original piece, which was a New York Times exposé that was published by former lieutenant governor of New York Betsy McCaughey, on September 15, 2013. In her composition entitled “Obamacare Will Question Your Sex Life,” McCaughey makes the blanket argument that Obama’s new health care guidelines will facilitate the prying of doctors into our private lives. However, she offers no supporting data to prove what specific healthcare questions will be imposed upon doctors nor if those responses must be included. The warrant for her claim is that our private information once obtained will somehow be used against us. The author supports her first claim with theoretical examples of questions that the doctors will ostensibly be asking. Among these are “are you sexually active, and “with how many individuals?” However, she goes on to back up her claim with an unrelated assertion that fails to connect to the first: Namely that that Obamacare also demands that doctor’s shift to online record-keeping.  Finally, she ties these premises together with the assertion that since Obamacare requires everyone in the United States to have health insurance or pay a fine, all personal data will be intrusive, the information will be public, and it will be available. This is where the argument breaks down. While McCaughey does offer backing to support the claim of online documentation she does not support her inferences of standard questions that will be required to be asked by physicians. Nor does she offer data to support the claim that the responses to questions about sexual behavior will be automatically placed in online files. Finally, she does not make an attempt to support the assumption that online files are unsafe or have a tendency to be used maliciously.     

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/sep/19/betsy-mccaughey/betsy-mccaughey-says-obamacare-will-question-your-/