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Italy’s Living Dead: Doctors Paid For Patients Who Have Died

November 17, 2008 12:27 PM

By ANN WISE, ABC News Rome

Public health doctors in Sicily are suspected of claiming state money for some 50,000 patients, despite the fact that they were dead.

An investigation by the Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s national Financial Police, found that the state had been paying Sicilian doctors for patients who in some cases had been dead for as long as 20 years.  The cost to the state is estimated at 14 million euros ($18 million).

However, even though the doctors continued to collect up to $100/year per dead patient, it isn’t clear that they did so intentionally or even knowingly.  It is more likely  that the fault lies with Italy’s notoriously slow and disorganized bureaucracy.

Primary health care  -- checkups with the family doctor  --  are free in Italy.  The general physicians who work in the public health sector are paid between 70 and 80 euros ($90-$100) a year per patient on their list, depending on the region they work in, and doctors can have anywhere from 1,500 to 1,800 patients.

By law, when a person dies, the local registry office must be notified within 48 hours.  That office is supposed to automatically alert the public health office, which in turn should remove the person’s name from the doctors list. 

Doctors are not responsible for taking dead patients off their lists, but then again, they  don’t seem in a hurry to alert authorities, either.  After all, you would hope they would know if  patients  in their care had passed on.

It isn’t the first time doctors in Italy have been accused  of  caring for the dead or taking money for services not rendered. Nineteen doctors in the southern city of Bari were accused in October of providing services for 450 departed souls.  And another family physician in the same area  was claiming 26 euros ($33) per house call for dozens of calls he never made.

There have been cases in which doctors are asked to give the money back, or have had it taken from their pay, but the Federation of Family Doctors says the fault is not always the doctors’.

“The responsibility is absolutely not ours,” the secretary of the Federation, Giacomo Millillo told the Italian daily Il Messaggero.  “The sole responsibility is with the Health Agency. Cases like this do nothing but damage us, because we receive payment in good faith, that we then have to give back.”

Stories abound in Italy of sluggish (to say the least) bureaucracy, with notifications of all kinds getting lost in the meanders of Italy’s public offices. There are still cases of letters turning up at doorsteps 30 or 40 years after they were mailed  --  or 60 - year-olds being called up for mandatory military service (when it still existed) because their draft letters had gotten sidelined.

This latest bureaucratic failure, however, is less than amusing. It is a huge drain on an already-precarious local public health service that cannot afford it.

In Sicily the Guardia di Finanza has informed judicial authorities of the results of its investigation, and now it is up to the courts to decide whether the findings amount to fraud or not.

November 17, 2008 in Ann Wise | Permalink | User Comments (0)

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