A Doctor's Right to Privacy?

There is an interesting sidelight to the Medicare data that allows investigators to find doctors who abuse the system runnning unnecessary tests and surgeries.  In today's Wall Street Journal, 

Christopher Stewart and John Carreyrou describe how the American Medical Association managed to keep records secret by auguring in court that the doctors right to privacy outweighed the public interest in determining how tax dollars were being spent.  Since a 1979 injunction, they were secret.  To the Wall Street Journal's credit they challenged this approach.    

So, in case we were wondering about why it took so long to discover that doctors were charging for more treatments in Florida than any other state, We can now identify who those doctors are and where that tax money was going.  I wondered how anyone could buy such an argument that a doctors right to privacy could outweigh the public right to such data.  

Worth reading is http://hr.cch.com/hld/FloridaMedicalAssociationvDeptofHealthEducationandWelfare.pdf

In 1977, payments of over $100,000 to a single doctor were made public.  The AMA and Florida Medical Association (FMA) objected that these disclosures violated the Freedom of Information Act, The Privacy Act, the Trade Secrets Act, the First, Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.  They asked that HHS be "preliminarily and permanently" enjoined from releasing the information.  An injunction, in one form or another, has been in effect since 1979, until reviewed and overturned. For awhile, it applied to release to law enforcement,until later modified.

In 2010 and 2011, the Wall Street Journal did a series of investigative reports showing the types of fraud that were undermining Medicare.  As a part of their investigation they sought relief from the injunction and went to court to get it.  In the end, they won, even though the HHS, AMA and FMA argued against them every step of the way.  HHS only conceded in small matters of law and we should wonder why the Federal Agency would back doctors over the public they are supposed to be supporting.  HHS is part of the problem and not part of the solution to the expansion of costs in heathcare.  The next time you pay your medical premiums, think about them.