Public fury as China mental hospitals recruit people to impersonate patients in insurance scam
‘Healthy’ so-called patients lured into psychiatric facilities with promise of long, cheap stay; receive little treatment, face ‘beatings’
A number of psychiatric hospitals in central China have been exposed over a scam in which they lure healthy people to become patients in a bid to defraud the public medical insurance scheme.
According to an undercover report by the Beijing News, most of the patients in such privately run psychiatric institutions in Xiangyang, Hubei province, do not show any abnormal behaviour and receive little treatment.
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Psychiatric hospitals in China’s Hubei province linked to national health insurance fraud
The healthy individuals told the newspaper that they stayed there because of a “free hospitalisation, free living costs” promise on offer.
In China, patients have to bear a percentage of their medical bills; public insurance covers the rest.
After they are admitted, they become cash cows for the hospital because the institutions use their personal information and fabricate medical treatments to swindle funds from the medical insurance scheme, the report said.