The antitrust laws and professional discipline in medicine.
نویسنده
چکیده
The decision in Goldfarb v. Virginia State Bar' in 1975 began a new chapter in the application of the antitrust laws to the professions and their professional organizations. The prosecution of professional organizations, and particularly of organized medicine, under the antitrust laws is not an entirely new development, however, because professional organizations had been involved in antitrust litigation long before Goldfarb.2 The peculiarities of medical discipline make organized medicine a good object for Federal Trade Commission inquiry and for antitrust enforcement. The regulation of medical practice-or the discipline of physicianshas long been a state police power concern as well as a matter for professional self-regulation. One of the difficulties of medical discipline is the lack of a single consistent structure. Instead, a number of levels of state and private regulatory efforts exist, to which another level of federally stimulated peer and utilization review has been added in the years since the advent of Medicare and Medicaid which further requires both state and private organizational involvement. These separate layers of professional discipline overlap at many points and provide opportunities not only for ethical self-regulation but also for selfprotective economic restraint and abuse. An inherent and recurrent problem in the regulation of any profession is professionalism itself. Only physicians know enough to judge
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عنوان ژورنال:
- Duke law journal
دوره 2 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 1978