Kane County Chronicle / KCChronicle.com • Friday, June 14, 2013
| OPINIONS
14
OPINIONS ANOTHER VIEW
Transparency for Medicare THE WASHINGTON POST One of the more encouraging recent developments in health care has been the Obama administration’s disclosure of data about how Medicare spends roughly $500 billion each year. Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services released the average charges for the 100 most common inpatient procedures, revealing wide and seemingly inexplicable price variations among neighboring hospitals. Last week, HHS produced average charges for 30 outpatient procedures from hospitals across the country. Now a federal court in Florida has opened a legal pathway to even more Medicare transparency. Judge Marcia Morales Howard vacated a 33-year-old injunction that barred HHS from ever telling the public how much it reimburses individual health care providers. The gag order was imposed in 1979 at the request of the American Medical Association, which claimed that its members’ financial privacy was threatened by a Carter administration attempt to reveal that information. Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and other advocates of disclosure argued that doctors’ privacy is now outweighed by the public’s interest in knowing what happens to a flow of taxpayer funds that is many times bigger than it was in 1979. Judge Howard ruled that the 1979 order has been superseded by subsequent federal court interpretations of privacy law – echoing an
argument that the Obama administration, again to its credit, had made before the court. That doesn’t mean HHS must immediately release all the data. Mandatory public disclosure remains the unrealized but laudable goal of a bipartisan Senate bill sponsored by Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa. It would require HHS to set up a free, searchable Medicare-payment database and clarify that there is no Freedom of Information Act exemption for Medicare payments to providers. For now, Judge Howard’s ruling simply allows the agency to entertain FOIA requests for the data with a much freer hand. That is assuming, of course, that the ruling stands up to an AMA appeal – and the doctor organization says it is still weighing its legal options. We would hope that doctors reconsider their position on this issue. Yes, Medicare is premised on their voluntary participation, in return for what they rightly expect will be respect for their legitimate privacy interests and those of their patients. But given the huge amounts of public money that Medicare funnels to providers – a significant portion of which leaks out in the form of fraud and waste – physician reimbursements cannot reasonably be considered purely private business information. Doctors should stop resisting the transparency movement and join it. After all, their profession is founded on a belief in free inquiry and the unhindered flow of useful information.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Whip out the passage pen To the Editor: For some time now, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn has been pondering whether to sign the bill making Illinois the 19th state to legalize marijuana for relief of chronic pain. If politics weren’t a factor – Quinn is up for re-election next year – the bill would already be law, and thousands of chronically pained Illinoisans would step out from the shadows of illegal marijuana use to relieve their pain legally. However, Quinn, like he did with his March 9, 2011, signing of the Illinois death penalty ban, doesn’t want to appear too eager to legalize a federally banned substance and rile up conservatives who deem it a “gateway” drug to depravity and destruction of the Illinois nuclear family.
Editorial board J. Tom Shaw, publisher Jay Schwab
Kathy Gresey
Al Lagattolla Kate Schott
Bunk. More people become addicted to – and even die from – abuse of prescription drugs, such as the highly addictive pain drug Oxycontin, in a week than have ever been harmed by marijuana. These legal prescription drugs are loaded with horrible side effects that take up half of the million-dollar commercials hawking them. They drain the finances of the chronically and terminally ill, while they degrade their health, all to make greedy rich men and women masquerading as the Titans of Big Pharma greedier and richer. Arguments that medical marijuana will cause these folks to graduate to cocaine or heroin would be hilarious if they weren’t so counterproductive to providing better pain treatment to people in need.
One of the most ludicrous comments from opponents of the bill came from Sen. Jason Barickman, R-Bloomington, who claimed we must follow the federal government model for regulating marijuana, which amounts to a 76-year-long ban that has been an utter failure of a sensible drug policy. Millions of folks have clogged up our jails and had their lives ruined over this essentially victimless crime. What’s hilarious is that while Republicans lambast every vestige of federal governance that actually helps people, Barickman praises one of the more truly dysfunctional aspects of federal rule. Come on, governor, whip out your passage pen, sign the bill and let the pain relief begin. Walt Zlotow Glen Ellyn
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. First Amendment, U.S. Bill of Rights