Global healthcare fraud costs put at $260 billion

LONDON (Reuters) - Some 180 billion euros ($260 bln) is lost globally every year to fraud and error in healthcare -- enough to quadruple the World Health Organisation''s and UNICEF''s budgets and control malaria in Africa, experts said on Monday.

"Every euro lost to fraud or corruption means that someone, somewhere is not getting the treatment that they need," said Paul Vincke, EHFCN''s president and one of the report''s authors.

"They are ill for longer, and in some cases they simply die unnecessarily. Make no mistake -- healthcare fraud is a killer."

The report reviewed 69 exercises in 33 organizations in six countries to measure healthcare fraud and error losses.

The combined expenditure assessed was more than 300 billion pounds ($490 bln) and the experts extrapolated their findings from Britain, the United States, New Zealand, France, Belgium and the Netherlands to get a global picture.

Data from developing nations would not have changed the global figure, the authors said, but were hard to come by, since the study included only exercises based on statistically valid samples with measurable levels of accuracy.

The report found evidence for many different types of fraud, from pharmacists dividing prescriptions into small packages to claim extra fees, to drug companies organizing price cartels, to doctors over claiming travel costs and abusing government grants, to patients making fraudulent insurance claims.

Two doctors were found to have claimed a government improvement grant for their clinic which they then spent on setting up a car import-export business.

RANGE OF SCAMS

A Thomson Reuters report published last October found that the U.S. healthcare system wastes between $505 billion and $850 billion every year, with around 22 percent of that going on fraudulent insurance, kickbacks for referrals for unnecessary services and other scams.

The World Health Organization''s latest estimate of global healthcare expenditure was $4.7 trillion (3.3 trillion euros). The fraud report''s 260 billion loss figure is based on an average of 5.59 percent of spending being lost to fraud.