Madam Chair, in response, generally that is the behaviour of all insurance companies. They often want to make sure they are reimbursing valid bills.
The advice we have with respect to privacy is this. When people seek reimbursement from our program, they obviously give us the right to inquire that the payments we're making on their behalf are legitimate. There are some complaints from providers who feel we may be too aggressive, but we believe we have an obligation to the government to account for the resources.
For example, at random, let's pick a dentist who has billed us for the replacement of crowns. We would go into his or her offices. We would check the X-ray records to see that the X-ray records when the patients arrived showed they had this and when they left they had that. Obviously, there's a record that a service was provided that they asked us to pay for, and that's the end of it.
It's only a method of determining that the service was supplied to us and the government paid for something that was a legitimate claim.