Overbilling and overtreating are driving soaring medical insurance costs in the Middle East as patients are leaving appointments with bulging bags of prescription medications.
And better medical facilities in the region are proving a double-edged sword for insurers due to a tendency towards overtreatment where people enjoy their visit to the doctor.
Speaking at Health & Protection’s IPMI Summit, Association of International Medical Insurance Providers (AIMIP) chairman John Carpenter told delegates there were too many dysfunctional parts of the process when it came to delivering international private medical insurance in the Middle East.
“The overbilling, the overtreating, which is rife in the Middle East, particularly,” Carpenter said.
“We’ve got to try and get on top of that but the problem with that is to do business in the Middle East, you have to work with third party administrators because they have the volumes of business we don’t have.
“And even the bigger insurers don’t have enough business to try and get discounts in specific countries because they just don’t have that volume of business.”
Carpenter’s talk was followed by an address from Qatar-based Amber Musson-Thorp, group commercial director – MEA at Lifecare International, who revealed as facilities in the region improve, people are prone to taking a day off to visit a clinic.
“They enjoy it. They go and get everything checked. They book a day off work,” Musson-Thorp said.
“You get 40 minutes with the doctor and when you’ve got a cold you come out with a massive bag full of prescriptions of everything you could think of. It’s crazy.”