The FTC's War On LabMD And Business Rights

By Ed Hudgins

LabMD, a business that provides cancer-screening services for physicians, has stopped testing specimens and is winding down operations because of government regulators. No, it has not been accused of malpractice. No, it has not been convicted of anything. Rather, the Federal Trade Commission has harassed it for years, and now Michael Daugherty, its owner, has decided that the financial costs of running his enterprise while defending himself against malicious federal persecutors are too high. Of course, the real costs are also borne by the doctors and patients who will no longer be served by the Atlanta-based company.

Daugherty has documented his plight and fight in a new book, The Devil Inside the Beltway. LabMD’s story highlights one of the nation’s most urgent yet underappreciated problems: out-of-control government bureaucracies wielding arbitrary, destructive power.