WSJ continues to cover Medicare costs

Jacob Goldstein, assistant general counsel at Dow Jones & Co., sent out the following to the staff on Tuesday:

Today’s article, “Taxpayers Face Big Medicare Tab for Unusual Doctor Billings,” continues the Journal’s long-standing effort to obtain and analyze Medicare data to help the public understand how the government-run health insurance program for the elderly and disabled spends the more than $70 billion it pays to physicians and other providers each year.

Since 1979, a federal court injunction blocked the disclosure of Medicare reimbursement data that would identify individual providers in order to protect the doctors’ privacy.  In 2010, the Journal, in conjunction with the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity, obtained some Medicare payment data, but only after much wrangling and an agreement prohibiting the publication of provider identities in most cases.

The Journal mined this data for its Secrets of the System series and “was able to identify and report on a number of instances of Medicare fraud, waste, and abuse,” as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services subsequently recognized.  A finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2011, that series, which included a report on how “Confidentiality Cloaks Medicare Abuse,” was hailed for “its penetration of the shadowy world of fraud and abuse in Medicare, probing previously concealed government databases to identify millions of dollars in waste and corrupt practices.”

Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, then took the effort into court in 2011, filing motions to intervene and vacate the 1979 injunction.  In May 2013, the court agreed to lift the injunction.  As a result of Dow Jones’s victory, the federal government began to release some billing data last April.  Since then, the Journal has been reporting on the newly-released data as well as “crucial gaps in the new data.”

As with our recent steps to unseal and report on electronic-surveillance court documents shielded from public scrutiny, Dow Jones is committed to fighting for transparency and exposing important information.