The Medicare data files have been locked in a box for 30 years. Now News Corp. the owner of the WSJ wants to break the box open.
The Center has proven that transparency of healthcare performance data is necessary to improve the way doctors and hospitals deliver care. This interesting twist from a newspaper may be the straw that breaks the camel's back?
MEDIA & MARKETING
JANUARY 26, 2011
Journal Files Suit to Open Medicare Database
By RUSSELL ADAMS
The publisher of The Wall Street Journal filed suit Tuesday to overturn a decades-long court order barring public access to a confidential Medicare database it says is essential to rooting out fraud and abuse in the government health-care program.
The American Medical Association, the doctors' trade group, successfully sued the government in 1979 to keep secret how much money individual doctors receive from Medicare, and the ruling still stands.
The filing by Dow Jones & Co., in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, comes after a series of articles in the Journal about abuses of the Medicare system. The articles were based on computerized Medicare records that represent part of the broader database at the center of the 1979 case.
Secrets of the System
Soaring Medicare costs threaten to overwhelm the federal budget, yet American taxpayers are blocked from seeing exactly where their money goes. Under a three-decade-old court order, Medicare can't publish the billings of individual physicians who participate in the program. In this series, The Wall Street Journal explores Medicare's vast databases and shows how they can be used to expose potential fraud and waste.
Methodology: How the Journal Crunched the NumbersIn Medicare's Data Trove, Clues to Curing Cost Crisis
Dow Jones, owned by News Corp., claims the 1979 injunction hampered the paper's reporting since it limited its access to the data and its ability to name physicians and other providers. Dow Jones says the effort won't violate patient confidentiality. "It's time to overturn an injunction that, for decades, has allowed some doctors to defraud Medicare free from public scrutiny," Dow Jones general counsel Mark Jackson said in a statement.
The AMA withstood at least two attempts to reverse the injunction in 2009. In one case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that under the Freedom of Information Act, physicians' privacy interest outweighed the public interest in knowing how much doctors were collecting from Medicare.
In a statement, AMA President Cecil B. Wilson said, "Physicians, like all Americans, have the right to privacy and due process, and should not suffer the consequences of having false or misleading conclusions drawn from complex Medicare data that has significant limitations." He added that doctors who care for Medicare patients already are subject to significant oversight.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the department wouldn't comment while the suit is being reviewed.
Health-care advocates, law-enforcement officials and others have argued that access to the data would have a range of benefits, such as exposing instances of fraud, easing evaluations of the quality and cost of care, and helping to ensure the government is doing everything it can to protect taxpayer funds.
"The Medicare system is funded by taxpayers, and yet taxpayers are blocked from seeing how their money is spent," said Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal. "It is in the interest of law-abiding practitioners that those who are gaming the system are exposed. Unless funds are used efficiently and intelligently, the health of the nation, physically and fiscally, will be undermined."
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