WSJ sues to open Medicare database

The publisher of The Wall Street Journal filed suit Tuesday to overturn a decades-long court order barring public access to a confidential Medicare database that it says is essential to rooting out fraud and abuse in the government health-care program.

Russell Adams of The Journal writes, “The American Medical Association, the doctors’ trade group, successfully sued the government in 1979 to keep secret how much money individual doctors receive from Medicare, and the ruling still stands.

“The filing by Dow Jones & Co., in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, comes after a series of articles in the Journal about abuses of the Medicare system. The articles were based on computerized Medicare records that represent part of the broader database at the center of the 1979 case.

“Dow Jones, owned by News Corp., claims the original 1979 injunction hampered the paper’s reporting because it limited its access to the data and its ability to name physicians and other providers. Dow Jones says the effort won’t violate patient confidentiality. ‘It’s time to overturn an injunction that, for decades, has allowed some doctors to defraud Medicare free from public scrutiny,’ Dow Jones general counsel Mark Jackson said in a statement.”

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