Prescribing traditional Chinese medicine and dispensing traditional Vietnamese medicine, earning a difference of more than 270 million VND

A series of acts of profiteering from health insurance and social insurance funds with amounts up to thousands of billions of VND have been discovered by authorities in recent times.

There is a phenomenon of medical staff taking advantage of health insurance funds. Illustrative photo.

On August 3, Mr. Pham Luong Son, Deputy General Director of Vietnam Social Security, said that in the past 5 years (2012-2017), with the cooperation of the police, many cases of profiteering from social insurance and health insurance funds have been discovered. The forms of profiteering are increasingly "professional": creating fake records; falsifying documents to receive sick leave and maternity benefits; falsely declaring people who receive health insurance treatment to profit from medicine costs.

Even in Bac Kan province, there was an employee of the Traditional Medicine Center who abused the health insurance fund by prescribing traditional Chinese medicine for patients, but when dispensing the medicine to the patient, he changed it to traditional Vietnamese medicine because traditional Chinese medicine has a higher value than traditional Vietnamese medicine, the difference was 274 million VND.

Local Social Insurance Agencies, in coordination with the police and relevant local agencies, conducted 835 interdisciplinary inspections, checks, and verifications at 2,308 units. Thereby, requiring employers to complete procedures for compulsory social insurance participation for 4,812 employees who are required to participate in health insurance; implementing debt settlement and collection (including late payment interest) with an amount of VND 576,073 million; requesting collection of VND 17,043 million in social insurance, voluntary insurance, health insurance arrears and incorrect payments due to abuse of policies.

During the process of implementing the collection, the amount of debt recovered was 252,797 million VND; at the same time, 6,447 million VND of social insurance, unemployment insurance, health insurance, and incorrect payments due to abuse of social insurance regimes were recovered; 3,134 million VND was recovered due to incorrect payments and abuse of health insurance medical examination and treatment costs.

However, Vietnam Social Security also said that many loss-making businesses have dissolved, gone bankrupt, stopped operations or reduced their scale, leading to bad debts in the social insurance and health insurance sectors, making it difficult to handle this issue. In the coming time, this agency proposed that the General Department of Police strengthen the direction of the Department of Police for Investigation of Economic Crimes and Corruption C46, ​​the Economic Police Department PC46... to support units in the social insurance system in recovering outstanding debts and late payments from businesses and coordinate in handling acts of intentionally evading social insurance payments, abusing and profiteering from the fund.

According to TNO