DRUG DATABASE BILL FAILS TO GET SUPPORT

TALLAHASSEE - Worries about patient privacy drove Florida legislators
Friday to block passage of a bill calling for a government-run
prescription drug database.

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

The Florida House sent to Gov. Jeb Bush Senate Bill 1064 giving the
Agency for Health Care Administration new authority to get more data
about medical diagnoses before authorizing Medicaid payments.

The measure gives the state the ability to remove doctors from the
government insurance program if the physicians are found to be
prescribing inappropriate amounts of medicine. 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
that was set up in response to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel series
"Drugging the Poor." The series found that fewer 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 legislators for passing the bill, but called legislators'
rejection of the drug database plan (HB 397) "a big disappointment,"
saying that the Legislature missed an opportunity to create a powerful
tool for stopping drug overdoses.

The database proposal is a response to 3,324 prescription-drug
overdose deaths in Florida last year, as well as investigations by the
Orlando Sentinel and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

The system would allow 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 but failed to bring it up for a
vote. Only a few legislators spoke in favor of it, but both Democrats
and Republicans 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."

"If that's not big brother, I don't know what is," added Rep. Rene
Garcia, R-Miami. "My parents fled a communist country; government
should not be in our everyday lives. Government is not the answer."

Bush allies in the House said legislators didn't realize the
limitations that would be placed on accessing the prescription data.

"It's a shame that people really didn't look at all the protections
for privacy that we put into the bill," said Rep. Gayle Harrell, the
chief House sponsor of the legislation. "I'm not going to bring it up
for consideration. I'm pretty sure I just wouldn't have the votes."

To help make the legislation more palatable to legislators, Purdue
Pharma Inc., the manufacturer of OxyContin, had agreed to negotiate
with the state over 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," Harrell said. "We're losing
all that money from Purdue Pharma."