Medical aids’ ‘racist’ targeting pushes chemist over the edge

I lost it, slipped into a mental breakdown. I had a gun and one night I almost wiped out my family.

Moloko Mokoditoa

The apparently racist conduct of SA’s medical schemes has left a string of broken lives and dreams, with a Pretoria pharmacist telling how he went from owning four successful pharmacies and a medical centre to working for Clicks pharmacies.

“I was a landlord of a thriving medical centre that I have since lost. I had two pharmacies in the city centre and two in the township. I used to employ 46 people but today I am employed myself, thanks to racist, malicious medical aid schemes,” Moloko Mokoditoa said.

Growing up in Atteridgeville township, west of Pretoria, he used to travel 15km to town to buy medication for his asthmatic mother and vowed then to study pharmacy and open a pharmacy in the township.

After graduating in 1999, Mokoditoa opened his first pharmacy a few blocks from his house and by 2011, had opened a fourth pharmacy and the medical centre. His nightmare started when medical aid schemes’ investigators targeted his busiest pharmacy, Tshwane Pharmacy, for alleged fraudulent claims and all his other pharmacies were subsequently blacklisted.

“I was put on indirect payment, meaning I would render the service, give out medication and the medical aid schemes would pay members directly, who would then pay me. Now I had to run around chasing members to pay me,” Mokoditoa, 45, said.

This was the beginning of the end for his business and sanity, with his costly attempts to fight the medical scheme bullies coming to nought.

“The following year I lost it, slipped into a mental breakdown. I had a gun and one night I almost wiped out my family. That is when I was admitted to a psychiatric facility for six weeks,” he said.

He said the medical aid schemes targeted successful black businesses to cripple them and their racist agenda was manifest in the use of former apartheid police as investigators.

Mokoditoa, who testified and submitted an affidavit to the Section 59 Investigation Panel in 2019, said one of the medical schemes removed him from his wife’s cover because of suspected medical aid fraud.

“It was only after they were ordered by the court that they reinstated my cover. That is how cruel and malicious these medical schemes can be,” he said.

The investigation, led by advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, probed alleged targeting of black practitioners over perceptions of fraudulent claims to withhold their payments. It found the medical scheme’s conduct had disproportionate impact on black providers, which amounted to unfair racial discrimination.

The interim report, released this week after attempts to muzzle it, stated that Discovery was 35% more likely to identify black providers as having committed fraud, waste and abuse, Gems 80% and Medscheme 330% more likely to do this.