Now influential Republicans are joining Wyden in pushing to make the files public. There is no logical argument for keeping information about proven flagrant cases of professional misconduct from the public. But doctors worry the reforms could go too far. Dr. Roger Rosenblatt has studied the data bank. He found many hospitals may not be reporting problem doctors and he predicts that greater public scrutiny would cause them to cover up even more.
Backfire is a very good word.
It is a well-intentioned program, but the side effect, like with a medicine, can be so bad that you don't want to use the medicine. Rosenblatt worries that data bank reports could become ammunition for eager malpractice lawyers and that good doctors might be unfairly blamed for unavoidable problems. So instead, he wants to see a reporting system like the airlines use. It isn't necessarily the pilot that's at fault. It may be the radar, it may be the instruments, it may be the weather reporting system.