Global healthcare fraud costs put at $260bn

Some €180bn ($260bn) 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. A study by the European Healthcare Fraud and Corruption Network (EHFCN) and the Centre for Counter Fraud Services (CCFS) at Britain's Portsmouth University found that 5.59 percent of annual global health spending is lost to mistakes or corruption. The report reviewed 69 exercises in 33 organisations in six countries to measure healthcare fraud and error losses. The combined expenditure assessed was more than £300m ($49bn) and the experts extrapolated their findings from Britain, the United States, New Zealand, France, Belgium and the Netherlands to get a global picture. The report found evidence for many different types of fraud, from pharmacists dividing prescriptions into small packages to claim extra fees, to drug companies organising price cartels, to doctors over claiming travel costs and abusing government grants, to patients making fraudulent insurance claims. The World Health Organisation's latest estimate of global healthcare expenditure was $4.7trn (€3.3trn). The fraud report's 260bn loss figure is based on an average of 5.59 per cent of spending being lost to fraud.