Don’t want to see your Medicare pay data released to the public? Better think of a compelling reason not to - quick.

In an Aug. 6 request for public comment, CMS asks why it shouldn’t release individual physician payment records, now that a federal district court says it can. Doctors worried about their privacy may want to comment between now and the end of the public comment period, Sept. 17.

A little history: Back during the Carter Administration, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (as HHS was then known) started publishing annual lists of all physicians and providers that got Medicare reimbursements, including names and net total amounts paid to each. HEW released the data in 1977 and was getting ready to do it again in 1978 when the AMA, together with the Florida Medical Association and six doctors, filed suit to prevent it. The doctors in 1979 secured a permanent injunction to keep their Medicare pay information private, and then-HEW didn’t challenge it.

Fast Forward to 2013: On May 31, a federal judge in Florida lifted the injunction in a decision on a 2011 suit filed by Dow Jones & Co. (owner of the Wall Street Journal) and the consulting firm Real Time Medical Data. HHS eventually joined that suit.

Now the agency wants input on whether or how it should revise the non-disclosure policy it has had in place since 1980 as a result of the injunction. Until now, for example, a Freedom of Information Act filing was the only way entities outside HHS could get access to individual physician payment info.

Things have changed a lot since then. These days, CMS says it’s committed to protecting patient confidentiality. Doctors? Not so much.

The agency says it is “weighing whether the public interest in disclosure outweighs the physician’s privacy interest in the information.”

After all, these days, Medicare is all about ferreting out fraud and abuse, increasing quality and lowering costs, CMS says, as if you didn’t know.

Send comments by email to Physician_Data_Comments@cms.hhs.gov, or by conventional mail to Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Attention: Physician Data Comments, Hubert H. Humphrey Building, Office 341D-05, 200 Independence Ave., SW, Washington, D.C. 20201. And by the way, they want it in triplicate.

DecisionHealth publications, in particular Part B News, will continue to update you on further developements.