Physicians as Secret Agents--Is Your Information Safe?

What a fucking fiasco. You've got to read this article about Blue Cross of California's request to have have docs help them in dropping patients.

Here's the deal. Wellpoint (owners of Blue Cross of California) has sent a request out to primary care physicians to pro-actively review the charts of patients and to forward on any information that may indicate a pre-existing condition that was not disclosed by the patient. They want the docs to take time to review records, but more importantly, to review the information of new enrollees.

Of course, it's to help them find a reason to drop patients from coverage.

My issues with this:

• Since when does the primary care doc become the tool for enforcement? Fuck this. Can you imagine what it does to the physician-patient relationship? Would you want to reveal everything to your doc if you knew they might report it to your insurer?
  
• We as primary care physicians get shit like this everyday....we're asked to audit charts and complete forms to help the health plan comply with HEDIS reporting requirements, to help them keep their costs down, to help them achieve "marketable" outcomes. Of course, paying for our time is out of the question, as is sharing the benefit of achieving these results. Again, fuck this. Civil disobedience by either invoicing them (if the contract allows) or by shredding / burning the requests sounds like a good idea.

The morons in the PR department are gonna get what's coming to them. They're trying to say that they're doing this to help out the large medical groups--but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that the new enrollees' information isn't with the new PCP, but rather the old one!

Fuckin' idiots.

Even if you paid primary care docs to do this shit, they wouldn't ethically do it.

Good post at The Health Care Blog on this too.