Harassment evidence: Switzerland, overcrowded fitness and yoga centers, incompetence and racism in accident response
15:30 Mon, 13 Oct 2025
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
When I first went to work on a contract in Zurich, Switzerland the authorities and contracting agency insisted that we were obliged to make various payroll expenses and health insurance payments as a family. They told us this was for solidarity. What actually happens when families of foreigners attempt to use the services funded by these charges?
The exact outcome varies from case to case. I've heard about some cases where people had used the health system without any problems but other cases where people suffered extreme discrimination and punishments.
Ponzi scheme mentality: overselling subscriptions
Many leisure activities in Switzerland encourage people to pay for a twelve-month subscription. The subscription fee for the whole year has to be paid in advance. Some companies accept monthly payments but the overall cost of paying in monthly instalments may be fifty percent higher than paying for twelve months in one transaction. On a monthly payment plan customers are still obliged to pay for twelve months anyway. These payment models are very common for gyms, yoga studios and similar businesses.
In the center of big cities like Zurich and Geneva, where the rents are very high, the facilities are usually not big enough for all the people who paid for subscriptions to come and use the service at the same time. Staff control how many people come in the door of the gym or yoga class and when a limit is reached they turn people away. Everybody has paid for one year of unlimited services but people are not always able to make full use of the service at the times they prefer.
The overselling of these subscriptions reminds me of the problems in the illegal legal fee insurance scheme at Parreaux, Thiébaud & Partners. The JuristGate web site explains the scandal. Like many ponzi schemes, in the early days of the business, the exponential growth in customers pays for the services used by the very first customers who joined the scheme. The scheme eventually saturates the market. The extra revenues from new customer subscriptions taper out. The business has to provide services to the existing customers based on the money accumulated from the payments made in the past.
The accident
The customers who paid for these subscriptions become more and more upset when they can't all use the service at the same time. Gyms and yoga studios both end up letting too many people into the room at the same time. Sooner or later, people have accidents.
On Wednesday, 23 January 2013, Carla was lying on the yoga mat doing one activity and a man doing some kind of handstand nearby fell on her. Here is the accident report:
I was in a yoga class. A person fell on me and I hit my head, I broke my lips and bleed. They did not send me to hospital and I did not go later, because I thought it was OK. But since then I have several headaches that are getting worse even my vision is being affected.
Lack of competence in first aid
The Swiss yoga instructor had continued the class as if nothing had happened. It could have been far worse. If an impact involving the skull results in internal bleeding, the victim may not notice anything immediately but a few hours later they may go into a coma. Every head injury in one of these situations requires a scan at the hospital. It is extremely negligent to ignore somebody with an injury like this.
Identifying if somebody has suffered a head injury and referring them to hospital is a standard procedure in first aid training.
Here are the instructions from the Red Cross. Their international headquarters are located in Switzerland too.
Red Cross first aid syllabus: You should watch anyone who has had a head injury for the signs of concussion. Sometimes you may not see the signs immediately. Call 112 if you suspect they have concussion.
It is not really possible to monitor a patient adequately if you have a room full of people expecting you to give them a yoga lesson.
Most of the Swiss yoga studios ask their yoga teachers to obtain a Swiss certification called Qualitop. Swiss health insurance companies give their customers vouchers for health improvement activities and the vouchers can only be used in businesses that have the Qualitop certificate. The current regulations for Qualitop tell us that each business must provide their staff with two first aid classes per year. The Qualitop regulations do not specify how many employees have to complete the training or how frequently each employee must renew their certificate. In yoga studios, many of the yoga teachers are ad-hoc contract workers who teach two or three classes per week. It does not appear that every yoga instructor has to participate in first aid training or hold a valid first aid certificate. The only real employees on the payroll system may be the manager and two or three staff who take turns to work at the reception desk. Even if one payrolled employee working at the reception desk completes the first aid training, the whole yoga studio appears to get a Swiss Qualitop certificate.
The lack of first aid qualifications is another similarity to the JuristGate crisis where I found that almost none of the employees are registered with the bar association and even the founder of the legal insurance scheme had not attempted or not passed the bar exam yet.
Carla was attending the yoga class while I was at work in a different city. I only heard about the accident much later in the evening. As I did not see the accident myself I had no way to perceive the severity of the impact. I had to evaluate the situation entirely on the basis of what Carla was telling me. It wasn't even the first thing she mentioned to me when she came home, it only came up later. She had left the yoga studio totally unaware that her injury should have been monitored for a few hours. She had traveled home alone on public transport and then walked home from the train station in conditions that were freezing with snow and ice.
Maintaining an appearance of quality
The yoga studio was expensive, they were situated in a prestigious part of town and like most businesses they had a fancy web site where they publish professional quality photos of all their employees. Switzerland makes an enormous effort to create the impression of quality so it never occurred to me to check whether these people had any practical first aid experience. Somewhat naively I assumed that if the impact had been serious they would have done the right thing and sent Carla to hospital.
Incompetence and racism in the accident insurance system
Fortunately, the medical issues were resolved within a few weeks but the disaster was only beginning. We experienced almost two years of constant harassment from both the health insurance company and the medical clinic as they argued over how to pay the bills or recover the costs.
One of the next surprises we had was the insurance company sending documents to me instead of sending them to Carla. It felt like there was something sexist in the way the health system works. They treat women and children like pets going to the vet and they send the correspondance to their "owner", the man.
In terms of who pays those bills, that wasn't clear either. I wrote to the insurance company and they replied to confirm they would accept the claim. After that, I simply forwarded copies of every bill to them by post and assumed they would do their jobs while I do my job.
A few months passed and they started sending the bills back to me. I asked Carla to speak to the yoga studio about it. Nobody at the medical clinic, the insurance company or the yoga studio seemed to have any answer. They all made faces at us.
In fact, there were potentially three other insurance companies who would pay for the accident. The man who fell on Carla is Swiss so it is very likely he had civil liability insurance. The yoga teacher probably had civil liability insurance too although it is not required as part of the Qualitop certificate. The yoga studio appears to have a lot of money and they operate from a large business premise in central Zurich. It seems unusual that the yoga studio would not have liability insurance for accidents that occur on their premises.
Accident insurance company failed to establish liability
We gave the relevant names and addresses to our insurance company and we trusted them to resolve the matter with the party responsible.
Yet 18 months after the accident, on 7 August 2014, the insurance company sent us a letter telling us that it was not possible to recover the costs from any other insurance company. They never told us why. They started insisting that we should pay the first two thousand five hundred francs of the medical bills ourselves.
The email sent to us in 2013 hadn't mentioned any deductible or excess. Here are the relevant emails from 2013 as they evaluated the claim:
Subject: WG: accident / insurance query From: M. S. To: Daniel Pocock
Dear Mr Pocock
I'm writing you regarding your wife's accident.
After receiving from you the completed accident report, we will check if the accident definition is fulfilled. Then it will be checked by our service recourse if there is a recourse to the yoga school.
Thank you for your help.
For any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Your sincerely
Here it is, nothing about an excess for us to pay, nothing about them being unable to pursue the yoga studio for costs:
Subject: AW: WG: accident / insurance query From: M. S. To: Daniel Pocock CC:
Hello Daniel
It's okay. If you will receive an invoice, please send it to us. I wish you a nice weekend.
Your sincerely
The first time they told us they wouldn't pursue the yoga studio was in August 2014.
Eventually, we contacted the health insurance ombudsman. The ombudsman didn't have any solutions either.
Eventually, in September 2014, I wrote to the director of the yoga studio. He met with Carla and he told her that nobody had ever told him about the accident and nobody told him about an insurance claim. It appears that the racist staff in the front desk of the insurance company had lied to us. They had never made any effort to contact the yoga studio. They had never told us the claim would be subject to any excess payment on our part. They treated us with racist contempt and they left these problems to fester for two years.
Native Swiss women have different outcomes
At the same time, I had been working in a company with a call center. This type of business employs a lot more women than other companies where I have worked. Every few months one of the women would disappear on maternity leave. Each of them would receive their medical expenses and six months of full pay. Yet when Carla had this accident, nobody wanted to help, the different companies all pointed the finger at each other and I was left with the impression that the stark difference in outcomes for Carla was based on some combination of racism and sexism.
Code of Conduct gaslighting for accidents
Among other things, when people join the yoga studio, they are asked to sign a form declaring they will not hold the business liable for any accidents. This type of legal declaration is used very frequently but it is invalid. Businesses use this type of clause to deter people making claims but if somebody has an accident they will always make a claim anyway.
Yet in the world of yoga, the mental manipulation goes beyond the legal text on the membership form. The yoga teachers promote a culture of being frugal and not talking about money. These attitudes are almost like the Code of Conduct gaslighting in free software organizations.
This is the behaviour of cults.
So you can't ask questions about money at the yoga studio. But if somebody stops paying the two hundred franc monthly membership fee I suspect the staff at the front desk will raise the topic of money very very quickly.
Medical clinic double-dipping insurance
Carla eventually decided not to use the same medical clinic again. In the last week of December, when many people are on vacation and the doctors have a shortfall in revenue, the clinic added an extra charge onto the accident account. In other words, they sent an invoice to the insurance claiming there had been a consultation in the month of December and quoting the reference number for the accident in question.
I asked Carla if she had gone back to the clinic again and she told me she hadn't.
Given that the charge was made at the end of December I was extremely suspicious that this was some trick they use to inflate the end-of-year profit for the clinic. Most customers do not see the individual charges on the account for an accident because the charges are fully paid by the accident insurance. Therefore, it is a clever way for the medical clinics to gain a little bit of extra profit without anybody noticing. Because of the discrimination in the accident claim, we were getting copies of every individual charge and I knew something unusual had happened.
This doesn't only happen in Switzerland. The authorities in Australia did an audit and found one doctor had claimed fees for five hundred patient consultations in a single day. When asked to explain, he said he had eyeballed each patient.
We disputed the charge with both the clinic and the insurance company. As with every other problem, they all pointed the finger at each other and made faces at us.
When they caught fraud like this in Australia, police were called in to prosecute the clinics and anybody else involved in exploiting the system.
Insurance regulation CEO got CHF 561,000 payout for resignation on medical grounds after failures
On 6 September 2023, the web site of the FINMA, the regulator for financial and insurance companies added a report to their media page about the resignation of CEO Urban Angehrn for health reasons.
On 19 September 2023 FINMA published a highly redacted decision about the closure of an insurance company. They only published it in one language, French and they did not include it in the press releases. This was the over-subscribed illegal legal fees insurance scheme Parreaux, Thiébaud & Partners. Read the redacted judgment and the unredacted judgment on the JuristGate web site.
The FINMA financial accounts told us that the CEO received a payment of CHF 581,000 when he resigned for medical reasons. It is buried in the original accounts written in French.
Why did they make this huge payment to the CEO of FINMA but when Carla suffered an accident that was not her fault in any way, the insurance companies and health ombudsman couldn't even write one letter to the yoga studio seeking payment? █
