That can only happen in the UK though, as far as I know. And it might be a bit dodgy even there. In the US (from what I recall) they can't shove a diagnosis under a broader subject heading without picking a specific subsection code.
Not sure about neurasthenia, but "chronic fatigue syndrome," a disease category invented in the US, appears to have been in part designed to help insurance companies refuse payouts to ME/CFS patients.
In the 1980s when "CFS" was created by the CDC, disability insurance companies were urgently trying to cut back on payouts to ME patients, because the incidence of ME had risen enormously since the 1960s, so this was costing these insurance companies a lot of money:
Following successful immunisation against poliomyelitis in the early 1960s and the removal of 3 strains of polio virus from general circulation in the countries concerned, the related non-polio enteroviruses rapidly filled the vacancy.
By 1961, the prevalence of diseases (such as viral meningitis) caused by these agents soared to new heights. In the mid 1980’s,
the incidence of ME had increased by some seven times in Canada and the UK, while in the USA a major outbreak at Lake Tahoe (wrongly ascribed at first to a herpes virus) led to calls for a new name and new definition for the disease, more descriptive of herpes infection.
Source:
RESEARCH INTO ME/CFS, 1988-1998 – Too much PHILOSPHY and too little BASIC SCIENCE! — Dr Elizabeth Dowsett
Hillary Johnson, in her famous ME/CFS book
Osler's Web, examines the shenanigans behind the creation of the disease category of CFS. In
this review of her book, it says:
Patients lose medical insurance simply for being diagnosed with CFS — a policy that continues to the present among major carriers.
Hillary Johnson also says that the name CFS was selected by:
a small group of politically motivated and/or poorly informed scientists and doctors who were vastly
more concerned about cost to insurance companies and the Social Security Administration than about public health. Their deliberate intention – based on the correspondence they exchanged over a period of months – was to obfuscate the nature of the disease by
placing it in the realm of the psychiatric rather than the organic. The harm they have caused is surely one of the greatest tragedies in the history of medicine.
Source:
Who benefits from 'CFS'
I would like to know the exact regulatory framework (and ICD-9 or ICD-10 code shenanigans) that enables insurance providers to refuse long-term disability payouts to CFS patients.
I'd like to find more evidence and information about this idea that the surreptitious purpose behind inventing CFS was primarily to help the insurance industry wangle out of providing disability payments to ME/CFS patients. Medically speaking, CFS was not really necessary, since myalgic encephalomyelitis already existed in the ICD-9 (which was in force in the 1980s), including the US version, the ICD-9-CM, under code
ICD-9-CM 323.9.
In the US political setup, the corporate sector has a stronger influence over government policy (via lobbying etc) than it does in European countries. So if the insurance corporates (which are multinational players) were to choose a country where they could best manipulate government policy for their own ends, the US would be the first choice.
Plus the fact that, more than any other country, US policy has worldwide impact. So if you set up this new disease of CFS in the US, it is likely that other countries in Europe and elsewhere will soon follow suit. And indeed, in the UK now, I think the term CFS — and its assumed psychological etiology — is probably used a lot more than ME.
In summary: it seems quite feasible that that one of the main driving forces behind the CDC's creation of the CFS disease category was for the express purpose of cutting off disability payouts to ME/CFS patients.