History of fee splitting in pathology

[LADoc00]

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The profiting off the professional component of pathology services has become some rampant the last decade, from groups of gastroenterologists hiring a pathologist and paying him/her a flat fee to sign out the case while they bill for the global to pathologists billing urologists to process and interpret their cases for a slashed fee and then letting the urologists bill for the pathology services at a greater amount in order to profit.

How do either of these scenarios sound ethical? Would that seem ethical for a urologist to bill an internal medicine doc for seeing a patient and then have the internal medicine doc bill for the insurance company or patient for the urologist's services? Because that is what is rampant in pathology.

When did fee splitting become cool in pathology. Does anybody know the history?

It began when the first pathologist hired a junior pathologist and paid them 25% of their collections.

Fee splitting is as old as the practice of pathology, just now it more grubby greedy hands getting dirty doing it.

Modern teaching hospitals, hospitals in states where is it is legal to employee physicians and large mutli-speciality groups all practice fee splitting.

 

[member0007]

I didn't read every single post above but isn't there some anti-kickback regulations in place already such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stark_Law... Why is it not being reinforced? Is it because the practice of 'fee splitting', in the variety of flavors that it comes in, has already become so rampant?