Congress Moves to Regulate Self-Referral and Physicians' Ownership of Clinical Laboratories

Responding to the rapidly changing nature of the delivery and financing of medical care, the federal government has enacted a new law that prohibits (as of 1992) physicians who own, invest in, or have certain compensation arrangements with clinical laboratories from referring Medicare patients to those facilities for laboratory-testing services. At the same time, the law directs the Department of Health and Human Services to create new reporting requirements — with which all providers of Medicare services must comply — regarding patterns of patient referral and the ownership of facilities. Information gleaned from these reports, plus a congressionally mandated study . . .