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Patients resell prescription medicine for cash
By Yang Wanli (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-12-17 08:03
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Stickers advertising prescription medicine litter the pavement outside Xuanwu Hospital. [China Daily] |
Doctors are powerless to stop patients who fake illnesses so they can resell their medicine for profit, the Beijing municipal health bureau said.
Anecdotal evidence suggests there has been an increase in the number of people reselling prescription medicine as the end of year approaches and patients prepare to be reimbursed for their yearly medical costs.
But Ma Yanming, a press official from the Beijing municipal bureau of health, said there was not much that could be done.
"Doctors can do little about this because they cannot stop those patients going to hospitals," Ma said.
"The only thing we can do now is to regulate the prescription and limit the amount of medicines that can be given for one prescription.
"We cannot blame the citizens. Some of them are poor and they do it just for money. What we should do is to persuade them not buy medicine from dealers because it is very dangerous, and I believe our medical system will improve."
Liu Fang said many patients at her local clinic simply asked for a type of medicine, rather than describe their symptoms.
"My neighbor told me that medicine dealers pay about 50 to 70 percent of the medicine's original price and most of the medicine was required to be produced within this year," Liu said.
The Beijing human resources and social security bureau said citizens found to use health insurance cards to buy medicine and resell it for profit would be put on a blacklist, according to the Beijing Morning Post.
An inspector of the bureau named Zhang Dafa said people on the black list would receive a warning or punished in severe cases.
"Some retired workers always ask those doctors who they have a good relationship with to get them more medicine, because they can make money through reselling. About 80 percent of the cost will be paid by the insurance company," Liu said.
A doctor who refused to be named said that medical costs were tallied and reimbursed at the end of a year.
"Some of them send the medicine to their friends while others resell them to medicine dealers. We can do nothing to them because they did have diseases, especially those senior people," she said.
Medicine dealers usually resell the medicine to illegal clinics or sometimes to poor elderly patients.
