[From article]
But the new policy will accomplish little beyond confusing patients and embarrassing physicians.
The problem is that patients cannot intelligently interpret the CMS data.
[. . .]
The CMS records won’t help patients assess the quality of the services provided or compare one doctor with another.
[. . .]
CMS’s release of the records will have at least one clear benefit: helping to identify fraud and abuse.
[. . .]
But these records are already available to law enforcement and regulatory authorities. In fact, many physicians with unusual billing patterns in the 2012 record release had already been disciplined by state medical boards and/or law enforcement. Yet, Medicare continued to pay physicians who had been sanctioned, lost their licenses, or had been convicted of fraud and theft and spent time in jail—a failure of the system’s fraud-detection procedures that won’t be solved by the public release of physician payment records.
[. . .]
But most physicians take their professional duties seriously. They make a good faith effort to perform services for the best interests of their patients and not for personal gain. They don’t deserve to be pilloried based on misleading information. Until Medicare payment records can be made useful and readily intelligible, CMS should suspend their release. If CMS insists on going ahead, it should at least help people understand what they’re looking at.
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/eon0224jz.html
JOEL ZINBERG
When Transparency Isn’t Transparent
A planned release of Medicare and Medicaid physician data will likely confuse patients and the public.
24 February 2015
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