ABSTRACT
Legislators have passed numerous laws to regulate physician incentives. They have chased the changes in the healthcare system. When it was thought that physicians in a fee-for-service environment were bene£ting by referring patients inappropriately, the federal government and some state governments passed laws to ensure that physicians were not improperly in©uenced by £nancial considerations. The laws £rst prohibited a physician from receiving anything of value in exchange for the referrals, and then they prohibited referral to entities in which the referring physician had an ownership interest or from which he or she received compensation.
