European Laboratory of Nutrients directors arrested for insurance fraud

[Valentijn]

http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2014/04/alternative_medicine_testing_l.php

On Tuesday police arrested Emar V (69) and his business partner Jacques T (74) on charges of defrauding insurance companies of millions of euros, as well as money laundering and forgery.

Health insurer Achmea raised the alarm after noting that ‘a large number of similar blood tests were being invoiced for’. Blood tests are only insured if requested by family doctors, but the insurance company was invoiced for tests by alternative therapists.

Achmea discovered thousands of tests - some costing several hundred euros - were being invoiced without family doctor approval.

Full text at the link, in English.

Regardless of legality, the Dutch system sucks for investigating problems and causes in ME/CFS symptoms, making "alternative" labs highly necessary. Also note that "homeopathy" is used in a MUCH broader context in the Netherlands, and basically refers to naturopathy.

 

[WillowJ]

I'm confused about the charges: It's not considered the insurance company's responsibility to decide whether something submitted is appropriate or not?

They merely object to the sheer number of tests or they think the tests do not correlate to actual patients? Because it looked like the former. The latter would obviously be fraud.

I've not heard of charges for phantom patients/clinics given other charges besides fraud when it happens in the US by fraudulent traditional providers.

 

[Valentijn]

No idea really. I think the government has just recently started to require that insurers make sure the payouts are appropriate. But not all of them do it, so I'm not sure how required it is.

The problem isn't the number of tests, so much as the testing being requested by non-doctor therapists (or doctors not in the mainstream system?). I think the number of tests just caused them to look into it further.