AOK checks thousandfold recipe fraud

Thousands of pharmacists calculate wrong medication

19/08/2011

The general local health insurance (AOK) has come to a comprehensive prescription fraud on the evidence, in which several thousand pharmacies have reportedly settled for medications that were never on the market. However, the pharmacists are resisting the allegations and emphasize that the mistake lies with the pharmaceutical manufacturers in the AOK discount agreements.

How the current dispute over the alleged billing fraud is going, is so far completely open. The AOK reports on 30,000 cases in which allegedly drugs that are currently not even available on the German market were given to patients. As long as drug-same medicines were delivered, there is probably no danger to the patient from a health point of view, said the AOK-Bundesverband. However, no guarantee can be given for the drug safety of the preparations. Also do not go out of the recipes which medicines were actually prescribed. It is possible that the fraud cases currently detected represent only a fraction of the actual cases, the AOK suspects. For the fraud was only noticed because a pharmaceutical manufacturer for the demonstrably not yet on the market drug had received bills because of the wholesale rebate.

Recipes contain medicines that are not on the market
Currently, tens of thousands of suspected prescription fraud cases are being investigated by the AOK, the health insurance company reports. In June alone 30,000 prescriptions are affected. According to the public prosecutor's office, according to the AOK statement. The health insurance assumes that further cases of the recipe fraud in the further course of the investigations could be uncovered. The pharmacist a drug apparently not on the market on the prescriptions note and the health insurance so to speak with the nose on the prescription fraud, seems to outsiders, however, rather incomprehensible. This could also be an indication that the pharmacists actually, as alleged by the Federal Association of German Pharmacists Associations (ABDA), have not acted fraudulently, but only in the interest of patients. According to the ABDA, delivery problems of the pharmaceutical manufacturers, with which the AOK negotiated rebate contracts, are the real problem. The manufacturers often can not deliver the required medicines, which means that the pharmacists are in fact obliged to do so, „to give a drug that does not exist“, explained the ABDA. With the current reports of a thousand-fold recipe fraud, the public will „against better knowledge“ unsettled, just to distract from their own mistakes, so the charge of pharmacists in the direction of AOK.

Doubt on recipe fraud
Although again and again individual pharmacists and doctors attract attention through billing and prescription fraud, in which the personal profit and not the well-being of the patients are in the center, the situation seems quite complex with the current allegations of the AOK. That so many pharmacists should have tried to fraudulently make money with a non-existent drug, may be doubted, even if theoretically quite possible. How it actually came to the recipes with drugs not on the market, but now the prosecutor must clarify. (Fp)

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Image: Benjamin Klack