ALBANY — Patient advocates are growing ill over a plan by Gov. Cuomo to scrap a state website that provides health-care consumers with detailed information — including malpractice awards — about doctors.
“I don’t know what the agenda of the administration is, but making it harder for people to make life-and-death decisions makes no sense to me,” said Blair Horner of the New York Public Interest Research Group.
Nydoctorprofile.com was created in 2000 in response to a Daily News investigative series that detailed the state’s most-sued physicians and the difficulty patients had in obtaining such information about their doctors.
In response to the series, then-Gov. George Pataki and state lawmakers adopted the New York Patient Health Information and Quality Improvement Act, which, among other things, called for the Health Department to publish physician profiles on the Internet.
Cuomo, as part of his state budget proposal last month, argued the information contained on the website is now available elsewhere on Internet, such as WebMD.
Scrapping the site would save taxpayers $1.2 million a year, the administration argued. The budget proposal now goes before state legislators, who must adopt a spending plan by March 31.
