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Following the release of the Section 59 Investigation Panel interim report. 14:45
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The National Health Care Professionals Association (NHCPA) says it will launch a class action lawsuit against medical aid schemes following the release of the Section 59 Investigation Panel interim report, which found that there was âsystemic discrimination perpetrated over a number of years,â against black medical practitioners by three healthcare groups.
The Council for Medical Schemes (CMS) launched an investigation in 2019 after members of the NHCPA and Solutionist Thinkers made allegations that their members were being racially profiled, harassed and bullied by medical aid schemes. The two organisations also alleged that medical aid schemes would demand confidential clinical information regarding patients and would withhold payments.
The party called for accountability.
“The EFF calls for stringent action against all the implicated medical schemes. Furthermore, we call for a complete overhaul of the algorithm systems in place to identify fraud and wastage by medical practitioners and all of those leading these medical schemes to face the full might of the law,” said the EFF.
Gems, which was found to be 80% more likely to find black doctors guilty of FWA, attempted to block the release of the damning report. TimesLIVE reports that the scheme approached the court just two hours before it was due to be released on Sunday.
An investigation into allegations that non-white healthcare professionals were unfairly treated by medical aid schemes has found that found that black providers are discriminated against on the grounds of race.
The Government Employees’ Medical Scheme (Gems) and the Board of Healthcare Funders (BHF) went to court on Sunday to block the public release of an interim report about racial discrimination against doctors by local medical schemes.
It was due to be released at midday on Sunday at a press conference, but, according to the court documents, the applicants claim “scathing allegations and findings in relation to Gems (and others)”.
And the facts that the state-owned medical aid has not seen the interim report or the investigation’s terms of reference, nor has it been given an opportunity to comment on it, make the public release a contravention of the Medical Schemes Act, the applicants claim.