Pricey private health care investigation long overdue

IN AN interesting development, Shan Ramburuth, the Competition Commission chief, will accede to a request from Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi to investigate alleged excesses in the private medical industry.

In my opinion Motsoaledi is the best minister of Health we have ever had, perhaps the most able minister of any portfolio. Prolific correspondent to The Star pertaining to medical issues Dr A Levin must be apoplectic, and I expect to see a furious missive from him in the letters columns shortly.

In the modern idiom, major industries in even the most economically liberal countries are not considered as protected royal game, but are subject to the stringent scrutiny of equivalents of our Competition Commission so that consumers will not be ruthlessly exploited by greedy conglomerates.

The multi-faceted private medical industry and its practitioners are certainly not a benevolent charitable entity, but are a huge behemoth generating billions of rand in profits, so we should insist that the same scrutiny applicable to all other major industries should be equally applied to private medical provision.

It is even more imperative to have regulatory controls as we are not talking about a routine mercantile concern but the health and physical wellbeing of the nation.

I go further and recommend that the Consumer Commission’s terms of reference are broadened to include the medical aid industry which is becoming ever more unaffordable to most financially squeezed South Africans.

The genesis of medical aid was to provide a non-profitmaking, all-encompassing and affordable medical insurance to a large swathe of South Africans across the spectrum of lower to middle income and even the wealthy strata, leaving all but a minority few unemployed and indigent citizens to have to rely on the state medical facilities.

Then in typical fashion of greedy capitalism, enterprising businesspeople remodelled the industry by cleverly instituting umbrella divisions to the medical aids, ostensibly to provide an administrative function, but that arm is now able to cream off hyper profits in the previously non-profit-making medical aid industry.

No wonder medical aid membership is becoming increasingly unaffordable to many South Africans – and where they can afford membership, it is in a limited capacity which no longer means 100 percent cover.

No one begrudges doctors and medical facilities making decent financial returns from their service to society, but when the profits become excessive, to the detriment of the health of the nation, then it does become the government’s right to intervene.

Medical costs can be detrimental to one’s health. When I peruse my salary slip and see the huge chunk carved out of my remuneration going to medical aid contributions, I feel physically ill, perhaps the symptoms of a major coronary developing.

But that is nothing compared to receiving the astronomical pharmaceutical, physician and hospital bills after being treated at a private clinic. The shock is enough to induce a chronic life-threatening relapse.

So I welcome the forthcoming inquiry into private medicare. It’s not a moment too soon.

Benoni