Doctors’ syndicate calls for “independent supervisory body”, after health insurance funds defend approach to long-term illness in parliament | News

“It is not the health insurance funds that write people sick,” Luc Van Gorp, chairman of CM, responded today in Parliament to the commotion surrounding the long-term ill. Recent leaked reports, including a 2020 report discovered by HLN, showed that there have never been so many long-term ill people in our country and that many of them have been wrongly declared long-term ill. The health insurance funds were allowed to defend themselves against the criticism today. There is a need for an “independent supervisory body, separate from the health insurance funds,” responds the Flemish Doctors Syndicate.

There has been a lot of commotion in recent weeks about people with long-term illnesses. Never before have there been so many of them in our country. Last week it was announced that this already concerns 576,000 Belgians.

Moreover, many of them have been wrongly declared ill for a long period of time. This is evident from a new sample from the Riziv, which the newspaper ‘De Standaard’ was able to view: more than a quarter of the people who were sick at home for more than a year last year received sickness benefits wrongly or for too long.

Last month, an investigation by HLN examined a 2020 report from the Riziv in which 60 percent of the checked long-term ill patients were wrongly declared incapacitated for work.

The health insurance funds had to answer for this in parliament today.

The health insurance funds emphasized, as before, that the figures from the report cannot be generalized to the entire population. “The discourse is not intellectually correct. It gives a false image of the sector,” said Xavier Brenez of the Independent Health Insurance Funds.

According to Brenez, in many cases the advisory doctors of the health insurance funds even act “too strict”: “Of the insured persons who appeal against a decision to terminate the disability, 30 percent are successful in the labor court.”

Paul Callewaert of the socialist health insurance fund Solidaris emphasized that of the more than 575,000 long-term ill people, 100,000 have resumed work part-time, but “people keep forgetting to mention that.”

The health insurance funds refer 15,000 people to the regional employment services every year. “It is up to the labor market to create jobs,” he said.

Luc Van Gorp of CM also emphasized this. “I hope that we will think together about the question of who wants to give the long-term sick people decent work. If we do not dare to ask or answer that question, we should not even have the debate about the long-term sick,” he said. “Many employers are not keen on that.”

The Flemish Doctors Syndicate uses the criticism to argue for an “independent supervisory body, separate from the health insurance funds”. The syndicate now sees “political momentum for a thorough reform of the system”.

In the current system, the syndicate does not simply see “a few derailments, but structural weaknesses that have been politically shielded for years.” The organization therefore says it expects that the operation and financing of the health insurance funds will “finally be thoroughly examined”, which should lead to “a thorough reform of the role and financing of the health insurance funds”.

In addition, the Flemish Doctors Syndicate also requests “full transparency about Riziv reports and policy decisions”. Reports and random samples published in the press in recent months prove to doctors that “the disability check is insufficiently functioning”.

Employer organization Voka sees a central role for the occupational doctor, and no longer the advisory doctor of the health insurance fund.

For Voka CEO Frank Beckx, the best way to reduce the number of long-term ill people is “simplicity”. “Instead of a multitude of doctors, we put the occupational doctor at the center: he is the only doctor who can consider both the medical and work-related aspects.”