In 1979, a federal court in Tampa granted an injunction that ordered federal health officials to keep secret the amount that Medicare pays doctors. Now that ruling has been overturned.
That secrecy has reigned nationwide all these years -- even after the Wall Street Journal crunched data and published articles that showed certain physicians were almost certainly committing fraud and collecting unearned sums at taxpayers' expense.
Now, as Reuters reports, a federal judge has lifted the injunction, which the Journal's publisher, Dow Jones, had contested. The American Medical Association, which wanted to keep the injunction, is pondering its next move.