Insurance Health Assessment Going Too Far?

For a 50% reduction in our health insurance payroll deduction, our insurance carrier is offering all of its participants employed by my company a health assessment and wellness program.

The program requires annual check-ups and blood screenings, along with the completion of an online questionaire which generates a wellness report containing an overall look at your physical health and some general health advice.

I have some troubling feelings about this program. In theory it's a good idea to offer an incentive to get people to the doctor. Too many people, including me, wait until there's something wrong before darkening a doctor's doorstep. This program got me to a doctor for the first time in years.

What don't I like? Well, there's this questionnaire that we're required to fill out. I'm required to provide the results of my blood screen and checkup. I'm not comfortable with a third party having access to my personal health information, particularly my medical insurance provider.

More importantly, I didn't expect to be asked the following questions on the assessment, even after I indicated that I was married:

1. Are you sexually active?
2. How many sex partners have you had in the last 5 years?
3. Do you use birth control?

Aside from the fact that the results didn't discuss anything related to any of these points, these are the kinds of issues for your confessor and your physician, NOT YOUR INSURANCE COMPANY. How, exactly, does wedging itself like this into my marriage help my health?  I was not the only person offended by these questions.

We all know how insurance companies operate. They determine what health care you will get by determining what they will or will not pay; and thanks to ObamaCare they have a green light from our government, since every American will be required to carry medical insurance by 2014.

It all stinks of socialism.

Recently I was sent an article titled "What the Popes Really Say About Socialism" by the folks over at  America Needs Fatima. It's great stuff, take a look at it when you have a few minutes. While I was filling out the questionnaire it was Pope Leo XIII's quote that rang a bell. The excerpt that follows is directly from his encyclical titled Quod Apostolici Muneris:

(Socialists) debase the natural union of man and woman, which is held sacred even among barbarous peoples; and its bond, by which the family is chiefly held together, they weaken, or even deliver up to lust. Lured, in fine, by the greed of present goods, which is "the root of all evils, which some coveting have erred from the faith," they assail the right of property sanctioned by natural law; and by a scheme of horrible wickedness, while they seem desirous of caring for the needs and satisfying the desires of all men, they strive to seize and hold in common whatever has been acquired either by title of lawful inheritance, or by labor of brain and hands, or by thrift in one's mode of life.

Some "benefits", eh?  Eddie-Ray, we will be having a talk about all this.