Reuters: U.S.: Federal judge lifts ban on public access to Medicare data

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Federal judge lifts ban on public access to Medicare data May 31st 2013, 22:58 By Maurice Tamman Fri May 31, 2013 6:39pm EDT (Reuters) - A U.S. federal judge lifted a 33-year-old injunction barring public access to a confidential database of Medicare insurance claims, a decision that could lead to greater scrutiny of how physicians treat patients and charge for their services. Judge Marcia Morales Howard ruled in favor of a motion by Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, that the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida lift an injunction imposed in 1979. The American Medical Association had fought lifting the ban, arguing that disclosure of the information would violate physicians' right to privacy. Doctors had successfully made the same argument in 1979, when a judge ruled the release of such information would violate the 1974 Privacy Act. Dow Jones went to court in January 2011, attempting to overturn the injunction after a series of stories in the Journal found tens of millions of dollars in fraud and other abuse by doctors and other Medicare providers. The Journal's work, however, was restricted by limitations placed on the data released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which rendered anonymous all information pertaining to individual Medicare providers. That meant reporters weren't allowed to name individual doctors who the Journal identified solely through using the data. In her ruling, Judge Howard said that because of judicial rulings in privacy cases in the years since the 1979 injunction, the ban was based "upon a legal principle that can no longer be sustained." Officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services couldn't be reached for comment. The American Medical Association didn't respond immediately to a request for comment. A Dow Jones spokeswoman declined to comment. When the suit was filed, the Journal's editor-in-chief at the time, Robert Thomson, said: "The Medicare system is funded by taxpayers, and yet taxpayers are blocked from seeing how their money is spent. It is in the interest of law-abiding practitioners that those who are gaming the system are exposed." Dow Jones is a unit of News Corp. (Edited by Michael Williams) Link this Share this Digg this Email Reprints

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