Content area
Abstract
For better or worse, the federal government is actively regulating physician conflicts of interest, including referrals of Medicare and Medicaid patients for health services in which physicians have a financial interest. The government's ever-increasing role in regulating physician conduct is a response to the profession's own failure adequately to deal with conflict of interest problems, as well as a function of the government's greater stake in funding clinical practice and research. The federal government's recent efforts to curtail physician self-referrals has left many physicians with the view that medicine is no longer a self-regulating profession. This is not yet the case, but physicians must substantially improve their own regulation of self-referrals and other conflicts of interest if they want to avoid such a fate. What this requires is, first, a better understanding of conflict-of-interest doctrine and, second, the adoption of a systematic and workable framework for addressing physician conflicts.