A hundred and seven people, many of them students, have been indicted for conspiracy to defraud the Bureau of National Health Insurance (
The indicted included a doctor, Hsu Chin (
The clinic fabricated diagnosis records and thereby took money from the national health insurance bureau, making NT$6.89 million in illegal profits between March 1995 and April 1999, according to the director of the bureau's auditing office, Liu Lu-kang (
In doing so, Hsu and Huang typically paid NT$100 to each patient who falsely registered. These patients were neither ill nor receiving treatment. Registration involved the clinic stamping their national health insurance cards, Liu said.
Alternatively, Liu said, many people had their names registered and insurance cards stamped in return for false diagnosis certificates from Hsu so that they could request sick leave.
There were also many cases in which people had their cards stamped in exchange for medicine or intravenous drips, Liu said.
Liu said that there had been a total of over 20,000 false diagnoses and each one on average had defrauded the national health insurance bureau of more than NT$300.
The single "patient" with the most false registrations had registered over 90 times, Liu said.
According to Liu, 84 out of the 105 conspiring patients were between 18 and 23 years old and the vast majority of them were college students. He said, however, that the precise number of indicted students was not clear and he declined to comment on which institution most of the indicted students were from.
The age distribution of the patients was one key to the discovery of the crime, Liu said.
"Because 18-to-23-year-olds are normally the healthiest, it was really suspicious that the records showed so many young people had come to the clinic so frequently," he said.
He said that so many students had come to the clinic because the news that the clinic paid money for false registrations and issued false diagnosis certificates had spread.
The prosecution said that the bureau, together with Panchiao prosecutors and the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau, had solved the case.
Liu said that in similar cases in the past the prosecutors only indicted the doctors and clinic staff but did not indict the patients. He said that this case came as a warning to the public.
"People who sell their insurance cards for such petty advantages may find themselves in the dock," he said.
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