Are patients being forced to give up their right to free speech in order to receive health care?
The AP is reporting that some doctors are now asking their patients to sign what is essentially a gag order, agreeing not to post negative reviews or comments about their performance on consumer rating websites.
The North Carolina neurosurgeon, Jeffrey Segal, who is pushing these agreements also provides the service of monitoring online reviews. If a negative review is found, and the author can be proven to have been a patient who signed the waiver, doctors can use the documents as leverage to get the reviews removed.
While Segal denies knowledge of any “longtime patients” having been denied care or treatment for not signing the agreement, his wording leaves open the possibility that new patients may be rejected, and it seems unlikely that a doctor who has been convinced this is a good idea would accept a patient who outright refuses to sign.
What’s more, given the flurry of paperwork snapped onto clipboards and thrust in front of our faces in the doctor’s office, this raises a question of informed consent. Much like the multi-page End-User License Agreements common in consumer software, we tend to simply agree, sign our names, and push through the red tape to get the service we need.
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