When facing cancer treatment, you need to know costs covered
WHAT is the point of having a medical aid if it will not cover all your cancer treatment costs when you desperately need it?
Medical aid schemes should be renamed “death-in-comfort schemes” especially when it comes to cancer treatment.
If the rumours surrounding musical legend Ray Phiri’s death are true, it is high time the truth about medical aids is put up for scrutiny.
According to media reports, the news of Phiri’s terminal illness came to light through social media, when his friend of 40 years and former band mate, Richard Mitchell, shared that the legendary musician had exhausted his medical aid funds.
According to Destiny Man magazine, Mitchell initially started a crowd-funding effort, after receiving a call from Phiri asking for assistance.
TshisaLIVE also reported that Mitchell had received a video call from Phiri on the Friday morning, telling him he was in hospital and needed help.
While Phiri’s death is a loss to our collective consciousness and the music industry at large, the ostensible exhaustion of medical aid funds brings to light a few questions we as citizens need to ask about medical aids.
How can medical funds be exhausted for Phiri at his crucial time of need?
What are medical aid funds for if they do not help a person diagnosed with cancer complete his treatment?
It is unbelievably disheartening that someone with a medical aid to his name has to request assistance from friends and family when the medical aid he most probably has been paying for years and should help him suddenly is depleted.
His death and the furore surrounding his medical aid bills struck a chord with me as these are the same questions I asked when my mother died of lung cancer while belonging to a “comprehensive medical aid” costing more than R5 000 a month, from a reputable company.
As a family in shock, we were told different specialists were coming to examine her for a “proper diagnosis” while we saw how her health was deteriorating by the day.
Each day, with each specialist coming to see her, her medical aid was being depleted.
Each specialist was having a piece of the pie at my mother’s expense and additional medical bills were piling up – which we (and eventually her estate) had to pay – and while the cancer was metastasising throughout her body.
The people selling such medical aids do not tell you this unspoken reality when selling medical aid schemes.
People buying them think they are covered fully, only to realise while lying on their death beds that the medical aid does not cover their bills completely.
With the rise of cancer all over the world, it is my view and experience that these schemes are out to make money and profit from cancer victims, rather than save human life and pay for the complete treatment of any type of cancer.
When my own breast had become a full lump, I was being moved from pillar to post in private care as doctors prodded my breasts, with costs ranging from R300 up to R25 000.
The R25 000 bill I was told the medical aid did not cover was if I wished to freeze my eggs since cancer treatment would most probably affect my fertility. This reality I was informed about two weeks after all tests had been done.
Not only is one dealing with the reality of a life-threatening disease, but with all the loopholes of medical aid schemes.
I stand to be corrected, but I suspect the same rings true with Phiri’s medical funds running out, leaving him – and my late mother – to resign themselves to their own deaths.
“Let me suffer in peace with my pain, on my own with my dignity,” Phiri told The Sowetan. My own late mother held the same emotions. Medical aid loopholes sometimes have the power to drain the fight out of someone when the schemes should be the very lifeline a cancer patient needs to survive the disease. Some serious questions need to be asked around Phiri’s medical aid allegedly running out, as has been the case with many others in the same position.
Phiri’s death should be more than a loss to music, but should raise the question as to how medical aids are handling cancer treatment.
Marianne Thamm puts it poetically in The Daily Maverick when she writes, “Phiri has now suddenly exited stage left, just when we need him most, when South Africa once again craves the healing and kindness of poets, singers, musicians, artists who can see us through the violence and current confusion”.
Cancer survivors deserve a better space from the medical aid schemes of which they are members.