“I think by and large it’s really important for government to release these kinds of data,” said Dan Mendelson, founder of consulting firm Avalere Health LLC. “It’s good government practice. You want to have an informed consumer thinking about cost and quality. That’s the goal.”

Political considerations may discourage Medicare officials from more aggressively mining payment data for evidence of fraud and waste, said Kirk Ogrosky, a partner at the law firm Arnold & Porter in Washington and a former federal prosecutor who led a Medicare fraud unit. His current clients include a doctor who is suing to overturn a ruling that he over-billed Medicare.

“Running Medicare is a political hot potato. It’s a lot of money,” Ogrosky said. “And every time granny doesn’t get her walker someone’s up on Capitol Hill complaining to their congressman.”

The agency has walked a fine line between going after abuse by doctors and ensuring they don’t make doctors less likely to take Medicare or high risk patients, said Kocher.

“Medicare has this tension between putting in controls to mitigate the risk that there’s fraud with stifling the growth of small business and doctors trying to innovate,” he said. “Medicare should use this data to identify outliers and people who have patterns that are exceptional, to be better. Frankly, by making this data public maybe there will be some innovations in how this data can better be used by Medicare.”

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