False flag regulation
Your article (New demarcation regulations to ‘curb current market abuse’, January 18) was unfortunately partisan and lacked insight into the broader view of how these regulations trample the rights of the poor. Government has alleged that they are needed to prevent insurance companies from circumventing the medical schemes legislation and thereby harming medical schemes. Nothing can be further from the truth. Throughout the nearly five-year consultation process it was asked of government to produce evidence of this supposed harm. Nothing was put forward to sustain such allegations, other than purely anecdotal analogies.
The truth of these regulations is that they will trample on the rights of the poor to sustain the status quo of an unsustainable and failing medical schemes regulatory framework.
Instead of government admitting that the existing healthcare framework is flawed and requires complete revision, it is seeking to place blame elsewhere for the industry failure. In so doing, they have replicated the same unsustainable framework for the insurance industry to follow, with no regard for the effect on the poor.
Treasury has defended the regulations, claiming that they “strike a better balance between medical schemes and health insurance products, so that consumers are better protected”. This raises the question: which consumers? Certainly not the poor. The regulations have allowed more affluent medical scheme members to protect themselves with gap cover products but has limited the benefit levels of hospital cash plans, which are the only mechanism for the poor to protect themselves against hospital costs or lost income, and entirely removed primary healthcare products — again the only products available to the poor.
Government rightly states that more needs to be done to allow for healthcare for the poor, stating that low-cost initiatives and the Department of Health’s proposed National Health Insurance will meet these needs. But both these initiatives are years from conclusion.
In a further twist of irony, the regulations have been passed on the notion of “supporting social solidarity”. How this relates to removing rights from the poor and giving them to the rich is a mystery.
Michael Settas
Illovo