Last year we decided as a company to change our medical aid from spectramed to the promised land that is Discovery. The broker made Discovery sound like it was the second coming of Christ. So at a greater cost to the company and every individual person, we decided to apply to Discovery and got accepted, with some restrictions. My parents who are both nearing 70 were given a 3 month probation by the medical aid. Also my mom's chronic medication was not accepted by Discovery as chronic so it comes out of savings.
This meant that despite taking out one of the best and highest packages that Discovery offers and not being allowed to use the medical aid for the first 3 months of the year and paying an amount of +/- R 6000 per month between them and the company they still ran out of medical aid at the end of September. So in effect they had medical aid for 6 months of this year only.
On my personal medical aid I also ran out of savings by end of September. So I say, what good is Discovery? we pay so much for our cover and get nothing for it. They make the threshold more and more difficult to get to and give us less and less cover every year but the premiums just keep going up.
The problem here is that the Medical Aids like Discovery thrive on what I call the What If? syndrome. Everyone says it, What if I have an accident? What if I get hijacked and shot? What if I need a major Surgery? What if my kid gets really sick? Because of that and that alone the medical aids in this country survive and do pretty well.
I think all medical aids are exactly the same, there is no one scheme that is better than the next. It's like choosing a winner on SA Idols, they are all bad singers, we just pick the least bad.
