Tania Mathias – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Tania Mathias on 2015-11-19.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether his Department has taken steps to recover costs to the NHS resulting from the actions of Hungarian journalist Ani Horvath as part of an investigation of fraud in the European Health Insurance Cards scheme.

Ben Gummer

The Department is undertaking a major piece of work to examine and identify areas for improvement in all the administrative systems relating to European Economic Area healthcare payments (incoming and outgoing), including the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) scheme.

If an EHIC is used fraudulently, the Department will seek to recover the full cost of treatment from the card holder.

The Department takes any allegations of fraud and abuse seriously and has been working with the NHS on an on-going basis to detect and tackle any suspected fraud and error since the introduction of the online EHIC application system in 2006.