CFM opinion says that aid without Social Security expertise violates laws – 04/13/2024 – Panel

Opinion from the CFM (Federal Council of Medicine) published on April 4 states that Atestmed, a system for sending medical certificates over the internet to grant sickness benefits without in-person medical expertise, violates current laws and can cause “unrelenting damage” to the treasury and society.

Atestmed is the Ministry of Social Security’s bet to speed up the granting of this type of benefit and direct in-person expertise to more complex cases, such as special pensions, for example.

At CFM, the report’s rapporteur was counselor Rosylane Nascimento das Mercês Rocha. The document was produced after the council received questions about the exemption from medical expertise, “in violation of the terms of current legislation, for determining incapacity and causal link in cases of work accidents for the granting of social security benefits.”

In the document, the counselor cites the laws that govern social security medical expertise and the granting of benefits for temporary incapacity. Rocha also mentions the 2023 law that created the program to combat the Social Security queue and says that, at no time, did the rule “waiver or eliminate the medical-expert examination.”

The doctor says that, with the introduction of Atestmed, “any medical certificate attached to the system will give rise to the perception of benefit, without any medical-expert analysis”, and states that the content of the document may be false.

“On the other hand, identifying the causal link in occupational diseases requires greater care
and research, as it is not always easy to prove whether the illness appeared due to work”, he states.

Rocha argues that the elimination of physical face-to-face analysis was ineffective as it generated an increase in requests for disability benefits and “encouraged the explosion of platforms issuing false certificates”.

“The medical-expert assessment, with autonomy and impartiality, using its own expert techniques and methods, cannot be dispensed with at all, under penalty of disrespect for current laws, in addition to compromising the professional integrity of federal medical experts and causing irreparable harm to the treasury and, consequently, to the whole of society”, he concludes.

In a note, the ANMP (National Association of Federal Medical Experts) states that, “in light of this technical reinforcement presented by the CFM, the ANMP will adopt new administrative and judicial measures with the aim of restoring the health of the social security system, based on the effective assessment of disability labor.”

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