Healthcare Fraud Scandal Rocks Morocco: Clinics Exploit Social Security Loopholes

Clinics in Casablanca, Settat or Marrakech are accused of fictitious interventions. These clinics, in collusion with intermediaries operating under the cover of civil associations, have organized medical caravans in villages and mountainous areas, to target healthy men and women, but with full health coverage granted to people unable to pay contributions, in order to have them undergo fictitious examinations and interventions, reports Al Akhbar. Worse, some of them do not hesitate to select patients for fictitious cardiac surgical procedures, such as catheterization operations, the costs of which are 100% covered by the CNSS.

Weekly operations are carried out in several working-class neighborhoods and rural areas, particularly in Taroudant, Azilal and Chichaoua. The clinics would have recruited hundreds of people for examinations and tests aimed at detecting alleged chronic diseases, fully reimbursed by the National Social Security Fund. These practices would have brought a lot of money to certain clinics.

Private sector doctors had warned about manipulations aimed at obtaining fraudulent reimbursements through medical campaigns and fictitious operations affecting a wide public. In a statement, the private ophthalmologists’ union denounced the waste of AMO resources and the proliferation of cataract surgery campaigns organized under the guise of social action, but orchestrated to generate profits by complicit clinics and associations. These practices violate all ethical and medical standards and endanger the visual health of citizens while threatening the resources of the National Social Security Fund, the union stressed. And to add: these practices exhaust the financial resources of the fund by generating reimbursements for unnecessary interventions.

Doctors are calling on the authorities to intervene quickly to put an end to these illegal campaigns. They also call for an investigation into those responsible and for the sanctioning of the associations, clinics and practitioners involved.