‘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.

“This is nasty business,” says New York cardiologist Dr. Adam Budzikowski. He called the sex questions “insensitive, stupid and very intrusive.” He couldn’t think of an occasion when a cardiologist would need such information — but he knows he’ll be pushed to ask for it.

The president’s “reforms” aim to turn doctors into government agents, pressuring them financially to ask questions they consider inappropriate and unnecessary, and to violate their Hippocratic Oath to keep patients’ records confidential.

There are perhaps few people who have been as dogged as Betsy McCaughey in trying to ensure Americans continue to receive crappy, overpriced health care. Her attacks on Clinton-era health care proposals were specious enough to (eventually) be repudiated by the magazine that published them; her more recent "death panel" invention caught the ear of the stupid-minded from Sarah Palin on down. She has made a nice little career conspiracy theorizing about any attempt to reform the nation's health care practices, and if there is any consolation to be had in her repeated wrongness it is that she at least has been reduced to peddling her crackpot theories in the sewer-like pages of the New York Post. So let us hear what the new McCaughey-invented Bat Boy will be Oh dear. It is about the sexytimes.Knows why? Because Betsy McCaughey told him so?If you were hoping to find an explanation of why your cardiologist would now be required by the federal government to ask you whether you engage in Teh Sodomees, you're out of luck, because McCaughey abruptly switches to talking about the abomination known as electronic record-keeping and how your electronic medical history is probably going to end up on WikiLeaks because that's just how things roll these days. Her solution is to tell your doctor to keep a second set of books (a set for copping to Teh Sodomees, and an official set denying it?) and to pay cash for the embarrassing stuff (pimple treatments and heroin, I presume) so it does not show up in the records. Good advice.

I still am at a loss to understand exactly why the McCaugheys and other conservative think-tankers are trying to very hard to scuttle health care improvements. The insurance industry has gotten for the most part exactly what it wanted; instead of a simple, cheaper single payer system that nullifies the avalanche of paperwork and profit-taking now burying you and every one of your doctors beneath six feet of insurance forms, they have been enshrined as the go-to players for nearly all Americans. The objections from conservative politicians think tankers are big on manufactured nothings like death panels and the government will know about your sodomees, but never quite rise to explaining what the hell the actual underlying non-fraudulent objection to reform might be. What is it? Is it something we can work with? If we want to start over, declare "Medicare for everyone" and call it done, I think a bipartisan coalition could certainly be built on that, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards either. There seems to be some pressing need to keep the current horrifically broken system as-is just because, and some genuine feeling that having uninsured people go bankrupt and/or die is preferable to any alternative system in which they do not. If McCaughey could explain that one to me, I'd be all ears.