SACP Questions Increases In Premiums For Medical Aid Schemes

28 October 2003

The South African Communist Party (SACP) questions whether there is any real and justifiable basis for the recent announcements of massive increases in premiums to be paid by members of most medical aid schemes in South Africa. The SACP is strongly of the view that there is no justifiable motivation for these announced increases other than satisfying the need for profit maximisation by those who benefit from their control and management of medical aid schemes.

It is workers' salaries which will be eroded by the announced massive increases. Already, the majority of South Africa's workers earn below a living wage. It is the same workers who are in trade unions who constitute the single-largest block of the estimatd 7-million members of medical aid schemes.

The majority in our country depends on the public health system and yet more than two-thirds of our country's health resources are in the hands of private medical aid schemes which are not in any way democratically controlled by members. In our view, this skewed distribution of resources needs to be addressed effectively in order to ensure that all health resources in our country are distributed in line with the public health crisis that we face as a country.

As the SACP, we call on the Registrar of Medical Schemes to institute a full-scale investigation and to take decisive action on the following:

• factors determining mechanisms for pricing, levels of prices in relation to inflation, and mechanisms for adjustment to prices of medical aid scheme premiums
• administration of medical aid schemes and the extent to which members and their trustees have effective say and control in the decisions and operations of medical aid schemes
• nature and scale of corruption in the medical aid industry
• discrimination against women, people living with HIV/AIDS and black private health care providers by the medical aid industry

We call for this full-scale investigation on the basis of reports and complaints that we have received arising from the SACP-led campaign on the financial sector. We are currently dealing with cases which point to prevalent corruption and discrimination in the medical aid industry. According to information we currently have, it seems that there is no serious effort to clamp down on corruption and discrimination in this industry.

This investigation is of extreme importance to the overwhelming majority of our people. We believe that these schemes are part and parcel of the broader untransformed financial sector.

CONTACT
Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara (surname Jara)
Department of Media, Information and Publicity
South African Communist Party
P.O. Box 1027, Johannesburg, 2000
3rd floor, COSATU House, 1 Leyds Street, Braamfontein, 2017
Tel - + 27 11 339 3621, Fax - +27 11 339 4244/6880, Cell - +83 651 0271
Email - mazibuko@sacp.org.za