The patient privacy spin is also coming from the bill’s biggest cheerleader — the California Medical Assn., a powerful lobbying force on behalf of doctors. Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times State Sen. Ricardo Lara State Sen. Ricardo Lara (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times)Why make it harder to catch bad doctors? Lara’s staff denies it has anything to do with $11,000 in campaign donations to Lara from the California Medical Assn. Last year, the doctor lobby was no fan of a Lara bill (SB 482) that required doctors to check the state’s prescription monitoring database before writing scripts for opioids. An L.A. Times investigation found that at least eight of the doctor’s patients had died of overdoses from the same type of drugs she had prescribed to them.

Source: Los Angeles Times May 31, 2017 12:02 UTC