New York State requires every cardiac surgeon to report the results of bypass operations. In late 1991, after a lawsuit by the newspaper Newsday under the state’s Freedom of Information Law, the state released death rates for individual surgeons by name, adjusted for how sick the patients were.
Surgeons responded. In a survey published in 1999, a majority of the New York heart surgeons surveyed said they had refused to operate on at least one high-risk patient. Accounts of the survey give the share as 62% or 67%. In a survey published in 2005, 79% of interventional cardiologists in New York said the report cards influenced whether they offered angioplasty to high-risk patients.