Antitrust & Ethics

The 4,500 members of the College of American Pathologists, said the U.S. Department of Justice, have been performing improper surgery on patients' pocketbooks. They have been conspiring to set unduly high prices on such services as urinalyses and blood tests, and they have tried to drive nonmembers out of the lucrative lab business. With those harsh charges, Justice Department lawyers asked the U.S. District Court in Chicago to prescribe a whole new set of business ethics for the busy pathologists.

Noting that there are some 20,000 commercial medical laboratories in the U.S., which do an annual business of $3 billion, the Government alleged that "virtually all" of the labs are owned by members of the college; it claimed that all such labs have agreed not to compete. Further, said the Justice Department, the college does not permit its members to work for any lab that is not run by pathologists for the profit of pathologists. Thus no member pathologists may be employed by commercial labs run by chemists, biologists or even by physicians who are not pathologists.

The college, as might be expected, sees its actions in a different light. It holds that its main purpose is to enforce standards through its code of ethics. And that code says that no pathologist shall practice in any lab where the boss is not a pathologist; others might not live up to the college's code. The Government, said Oliver Neibel, executive director of and general counsel to the college, has taken the first step in its campaign of "harassment of the entire medical profession." The suit was filed, he said, to put pressure on doctors already overburdened by Medicare.

The Justice Department insisted that it had filed suit to exert another kind of pressure. It asked that the defendant be "ordered and directed to take all action adjudged necessary to restore competition to the commercial medical laboratory industry in the United States."

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