“One of the reasons why you may pay too much into health insurance is a form of fraud practised by corrupt doctors and pharmacies. Here is how it works. If a drug costs £100 and the reimbursement rate is 90 per cent, then the pharmacy gets £90 back from the insurer. If the pharmacy presents prescriptions written by a doctor without actually having sold the medication, it can make an illegal profit. In Portugal, for instance, one doctor wrote 32,000 prescriptions for expensive drugs in one year – which boils down to one fake prescription every three minutes. The prescriptions bore the names of deceased patients or the faked signatures of deceased doctors. These doctors and pharmacies caused some 40 per cent of all public expenditure fraud in the country. To put a stop to this, the Portuguese National Health Service introduced an electronic prescription programme requiring doctors to complete the prescription and send it to their patients by text message or email, and reported that the system could reduce fraud by 80 per cent. In this case, the surveillance potential of software has been clearly used for the benefit of the health system.”
Lembro-me de colega consultora contar-me cenas deste tipo nos anos 90.
Excerto de "How to Stay Smart in a Smart World" de Gerd Gigerenzer
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