"Mystery shopping" plan to test access to doctors blasted as Big Brother tactic

(CBS) "Mystery shopping" sounds like something retailers to do get an edge on the competition. But the term also applies to a new Obama administration initiative that aims to test the accessibility of health care in the U.S.

For the initiative, administration officials are recruiting a team of mystery shoppers posing as patients to call doctors' offices and request appointments, the New York Times reported.

In addition to gauging the well-known shortage of primary-care doctors, the initiative is designed to find out whether doctors are accepting patients with private insurance while turning away patients with government-provided insurance, which reimburses doctors at lower rates.

Why launch such a program now? Because the health care law passed last year will bring an estimated 33 million new people into the health-care system starting in 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported.

"These newly insured Americans will need to skeek out new primary care physicians, further exacerbating the already growing problem" of a shortage of such doctors in the U.S.," the Health and Human Services department said in a written statement, according to the Times.

The information obtained during the effort will be kept confidential, according to the Journal. But doctors criticized the initiative, which is estimated to cost almost $350,000.

"I don't like the idea of the government snooping," Dr. Raymond Scalettar, an internist in Washington, told the Times. "It's a pernicious practice Big Brother tactics, which should be opposed." And Dr. Robert L. Hogue, a family doctor in Brownwood, Texas, told the paper, "Is this a good use of tax money? Probably not. Everybody with a brain knows we do not have enough doctors."

What do you think? Is government plan to test access to doctors good medicine -  or Big Brother in action?