It’s easier to make an informed decision about a used car than it is about a doctor:

In a little-noticed decision last week, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled in favor of a consumer group that sued the Health and Human Services Department to allow disclosure of specific data about doctors from the Medicare claims database.

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan concluded that releasing the data would be “a significant public benefit,” and ordered the department to turn it over by Sept. 21.

[...] The database’s usefulness has been limited by a decades-old government policy that protects the privacy of doctors, who fear the information could be used to micromanage the practice of medicine. But as the cost of medical care has skyrocketed, employers, insurers and consumer groups have pressured the government to open up Medicare’s files on individual doctors.

Those files could reveal far more than how many times a year a surgeon performs a hip replacement operation. The data could also be analyzed to determine how a doctor makes crucial decisions on tests and procedures that determine both quality and costs. They would show which doctors fail to order prudent preventive tests. And they could indicate which ones order duplicative tests or unnecessary hospitalizations.

“These data will make it possible to develop measures that will be very helpful to consumers,” said Robert Krughoff, president of Consumers’ Checkbook, the nonprofit group that sued for the information.