Fraud in Hospital Systems Part 1

I would like to talk about something that is very controversial and is going to cause a lot of uproar, but frankly, I don't care because it really happens every day. And I hear this from my other doctor friends all the time. There's something in medicine called Stark, which essentially means that a physician cannot make money by referring to another physician or another corporation or standalone diagnostic center or something like that. So my problem with this is when hospitals employ doctors, they somehow without maneuvering through the legal minutia, somehow incentivize their own physicians to refer within their own network, okay? This is known to happen. People talk about it. Like if they're employed, they get brought into like administrative C-suite offices like, oh, what could we do better? Why aren't you referring in our own network? Because sometimes referring within your own network is not the best thing for the patient. Sometimes the best subspecialist is outside of the network. So my thought is, and I know it's very controversial, primary care physicians, people who are doing the major referring to outside people, should be private. Because I have no incentive to refer people to certain hospital districts within my community. My priority is my patients and only my patients, not to benefit somebody else. I don't know how these hospitals are getting away with it. But it happens, and it happens every single day. And private doctors are getting pushed out of their practice from big hospital conglomerates, which keeps eating people up, and it's not in your best interest.