Administration cancels 'secret shopper' health care access survey

A few days ago, this story made a splash in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON ? Alarmed by a shortage of primary care doctors, Obama administration officials are recruiting a team of "mystery shoppers" to pose as patients, call doctors? offices and request appointments to see how difficult it is for people to get care when they need it.

The administration says the survey will address a "critical public policy problem": the increasing shortage of primary care doctors, including specialists in internal medicine and family practice. It will also try to discover whether doctors are accepting patients with private insurance while turning away those in government health programs that pay lower reimbursement rates.

Predictably, there were many screams from Republicans about "Big Brother," and death panels and the rest. The result of which, was the administration abandoning the program.

The proposal's dismissal comes after Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) called on his colleagues to sign onto a letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius urging her to nix the idea.

"I'm asking my colleagues to join in a letter to Secretary Sebelius sharing concern with the legality, standards and repercussions of this program," Kirk said on the Senate floor. "The cost in a proposed clandestine method of collecting information on physician offices is questionable, and therefore, I'm going to be requesting details on how this survey will be conducted, how investigators will be punished for any misconduct or extortion that they may carry out in their duties, and how patient and physician confidentiality will be maintained."

So serial liar Mark Kirk says that federal contractors in this program will probably be extortionists, and HHS gives up without a fight. Physicians taking tax dollars can't be mystery-shopped for efficiency because a Republican says it's extortion. These doctors, again taking tax dollars, can't be subject to simple survey, but any ordinary citizen can be wiretapped any old time the feds want to.

There's no question that the country is lacking adequate primary care providers. What this survey would have done is collect the hard data to find out things like where the need is the greatest, which populations have the most difficulty finding access, etc. The responses will be kept confidential?Health and Human Services did not intend to create a database of "bad" doctors who won't take on new patients, but to try to determine where access to care is most problematic. It was a smart idea, the kind that American businesses use regularly.

One of the objections doctors raised was that "the secret shoppers will not identify themselves as working for the government." Which pinpoints the problem in getting this kind of information in any other kind of survey. Whether the "shoppers" are calling as part of a government survey or are actual would-be patients shouldn't make any difference to doctors, which suggests that they might not provide the same answer to a self-identified government worker taking a survey and a potential patient. Gathering this information, which is essential for finding solutions to the primary care provider shortage, will now be more difficult.

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/zhE5OFgpPS0/-Administration-cancels-secret-shopper-health-care-access-survey

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