Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), recently filed papers to overturn a 31-year-old court injunction that blocks public access to records containing evidence of Medicare fraud and the doctors behind it.
The company's filing in a Florida district court seeks to overturn an injunction obtained by the American Medical Association (AMA) in 1979. The injunction prevents the public from knowing how much taxpayer money individual doctors receive from the Medicare programme. As a result, WSJ and other news organisations are barred from fully investigating and exposing abuses in the $500 billion system.
The legal action follows a series of WSJ articles last year that relied on a sampling of the government's closely guarded Medicare databases. The series highlighted suspicious billing, potential abuses of the system and the government's role in policing Medicare payments.
However, the 1979 injunction constrained the Journal's investigation and what it could tell its readers because it limited the WSJ to only a subset of the data. In addition, the government would only release the limited subset of data if the Journal agreed not to disclose the identities of individual doctors in the databases.
The Journal series revealed how Medicare reimbursement policies and doctors' relationships with private companies in the industry could be giving doctors an incentive to bill for unnecessary and high-cost procedures. It also reported on several doctors with questionable billing practices.
The AMA has issued a statement defending the privacy of physician payment data. It argues that physicians have a right to keep complex payment data, which is subject to misinterpretation, out of the public domain.
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