[Reblog] Fight for access to Medicare payments to physicians nearly over

From the 15 January 2014 article at Covering Health-Monitoring the Pulse of Health Care Journalism

BY CHARLES ORNSTEIN | JANUARY 15, 2014

Charles Ornstein is a senior reporter with ProPublica in New York. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer is a member of the Association of Health Care Journalists’ board of directors and past president.

View all posts by Charles Ornstein →

(Editor’s note: This is a revision of the original post, which is available on Ornstein’s Tumblr site.)

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said yesterday that it will soon begin releasing data on payments to individual physicians in the Medicare program.

Why is this such a big deal?

Because it overturns a longstanding agency policy that for more than three decades had barred the release of this very information. And, it follows advocacy for greater transparency by numerous news organizations, including the Association of Health Care Journalists.

AHCJ’s board of directors last September sent a letter of comment to CMS asserting the public’s interest in release of this information. “As long as patient confidentiality is protected, we see no reason why taxpayers should not know how individual physicians are spending public dollars,” said the letter, signed by AHCJ executive director Len Bruzzese.

…

As this fight has played out, CMS released data to ProPublica on which drugs physicians prescribe in Medicare’s drug program, known as Part D. You can now look up your doctor’s prescribing patterns online.

 

Read the entire article here

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