PRIVACY FEARS KILL FLORIDA PRESCRIPTION DATABASE

But Health Officials Got More Power To Fight Medicaid Fraud And
Prescription Abuse

TALLAHASSEE -- Worries about patient privacy drove Florida legislators
Friday to kill a bill calling for a prescription-drug database.

But lawmakers agreed in a separate bill to give state health officials more
powers to fight prescription-drug abuse and Medicaid fraud.

The Florida House approved the second measure (SB 1064) and sent it to Gov.
Jeb Bush. It gives the Agency for Health Care Administration new authority
to get more information about medical diagnoses before authorizing Medicaid
payments.

The measure gives the state the ability to ban doctors from the government
insurance program if they are prescribing too much medicine. And anyone
convicted of defrauding Medicaid also could be denied benefits for a year
or longer.

The wide-ranging measure stems from the work of a select subcommittee set
up in response to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel series "Drugging the
Poor." The series found that less than 3 percent of the state's medical
professionals prescribed more than two-thirds of the narcotics and other
dangerous drugs, and that some of these doctors had multiple patients die
from pill overdoses.

Bush praised lawmakers for passing the bill but called lawmakers' rejection
of the drug-database plan (HB 397) "a big disappointment." He said the
Legislature missed an opportunity to create a powerful tool for stopping
drug overdoses.

The database proposal was in response to 3,324 prescription-drug- overdose
deaths in Florida last year, as well as investigations about abuse of
prescription drugs by the Orlando Sentinel and the Sun- Sentinel.

The system would have allowed doctors, designated medical assistants and
pharmacists to look up online the pharmacy records of patients age 17 and
older to ensure they haven't been shopping around for multiple
prescriptions. The records monitored would include potentially addictive
drugs, such as Xanax, Valium and the painkiller OxyContin.

The House debated the drug-database idea but failed to bring it up for a
vote. Only a few lawmakers spoke in favor of it, but Democrats and
Republicans alike said they were opposed.

"This goes far in violation of [constitutionally protected] liberties,"
said Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach. "It has some advantages, but we'd have
to accept some other deprivations of liberty that I don't think we should
tolerate."

Bush allies in the House said lawmakers weren't fully considering the
limitations that would be placed on accessing the prescription data.

To help make the legislation more palatable to lawmakers, Purdue Pharma
Inc., the manufacturer of OxyContin, had agreed to negotiate with the state
about paying the costs for the database. Analysts say it will cost about $2
million to develop and about $2.8 million a year to run.

"We've made a big financial mistake," said Rep. Gayle Harrell, R- Stuart.
"We're losing all that money from Purdue Pharma."

Mark Hollis can be reached at 850-224-6214 or mhollis@sun-sentinel.com.