(Editor’s note: This is a revision of the original post, which is available on Ornstein’s Tumblr site.)

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said yesterday that it will soon begin releasing data on payments to individual physicians in the Medicare program.

Why is this such a big deal?

Because it overturns a longstanding agency policy that for more than three decades had barred the release of this very information. And, it follows advocacy for greater transparency by numerous news organizations, including the Association of Health Care Journalists.

AHCJ’s board of directors last September sent a letter of comment to CMS asserting the public’s interest in release of this information. “As long as patient confidentiality is protected, we see no reason why taxpayers should not know how individual physicians are spending public dollars,” said the letter, signed by AHCJ executive director Len Bruzzese.

Some background:

In 1979, a federal court in Florida granted an injunction that prohibited the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (the predecessor to the Department of Health and Human Services) from releasing data on how much physicians earned under the Medicare program.

A year later, the HEW department adopted a policy that stated, “the public interest in the Department’s disclosure of the amounts that had been paid to individual physicians under the Medicare program was not sufficient to compel disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.” Continue reading →

Charles Ornstein is a senior reporter with ProPublica in New York. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer is a member and past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists' board of directors and a member of its Right to Know Committee.