US Govt Drops Mystery Patient Project

In the US, the Obama administration has shelved controversial plans to mystery shop the offices of more than 4,000 doctors to report on the difficulty of getting appointments.

As late as Sunday night, reports www.nytimes.com , officials at the health department and the White House were backing the survey and saying it would go ahead as planned. The project would have seen 465 calls made to offices in each of nine states: Florida, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia.

Health policy experts fear a worsening shortage of primary care doctors if the President's health care law brings insurance coverage to more than 30 million people. A recent survey by the Massachusetts Medical Society found that about half of family doctors and internists were not accepting new patients, the paper reports.

Doctors and Republican politicians had criticized the project with talk of 'snooping' on doctors and suggestions that the difficulties of registration were already well understood and did not need proving again. Senator Mark Steven Kirk (R, Illinois) wrote to the administration on Monday demanding answers to a number of points and stated: 'The cost and proposed clandestine method of collecting information from physician offices are questionable.'

The Department of Health and Human Services said yesterday it had decided that 'now is not the time to move forward with this research project' and that the survey was 'on indefinite hold', although it denied that politics had played any role in the decision.