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A health worker with safety equipment.
Oliver Berg / Picture Alliance via Getty Images
- The judge says the case is not urgent, removes it from the court list.
- The decision means that the long-awaited report can finally be published.
- The Government Employees Health Plan says a report has been reported finding that, among other things, black health care providers are “unfairly discriminated against on the basis of race.”
The Government Employees Health Plan has missed an urgent legal attempt to intercept the release of lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi’s “scathing” interim report on allegations that health plans have racially discriminated against black, colored and Indian doctors.
GEMS, which provides health care benefits to public service employees and is South Africa’s second largest medical scheme, and the Board of Healthcare Funders (BHF), which represents the majority of South Africa’s medical schemes, launched on Saturday night an urgent request to ban the publication of the report, which was scheduled to be published at noon on Sunday.
The report is the result of an investigation by Ngcukaitobi and advocates Adila Hassim and Kerry Williams, who were appointed by the Medical Schemes Council to investigate allegations by members of the National Health Professionals Association (NHCPA) that they were being treated unfairly by doctors. schemes and your claims withheld based on your race and ethnicity.
In court documents, GEMS legal counsel Marthinus Kruger stated that the plan had been informed that the interim report contains findings that, among other things, black healthcare providers “are unfairly discriminated against on the basis of race.”
Pretoria Superior Court Judge Colleen Collis ruled Tuesday morning that GEMS and BHF knew the report would be released since November last year and had not “persuasively persuaded this court why they did not consider it necessary and prudent to approach this court before “.
He agreed with Ngcukaitobi defender Steven Budlender and his fellow research panelists that GEMS and BHF had engaged in litigation defined by the “urgency of self-creation.”
Instead of taking legal action as soon as they learned that the interim panel report would be released, he said, “they took a passive stance, crossed their arms and waited until the eleventh hour.”
Budlender had compared GEMS ‘attempt to intercept the release of the interim report to former President Jacob Zuma’s frustrated attempt to intercept the release of the report on the capture status of then-public protector Thuli Madonsela.
But, he emphasized, the GEMS case was even weaker than the one argued by Zuma because, unlike the capture status report, the Ngcukaitobi panel report had only made recommendations and was not binding.
Throughout his argument at a virtual hearing on Sunday, Budlender also questioned whether the GEMS request was prompted by genuine legal concerns or was designed to ensure that the panel’s report would be “buried.”
The ruling means that Ngcukaitobi’s panel report can now be released to the public.
GEMS ‘Aslam Bava had previously argued that the panel’s intended release of the interim report was “an illegal act” that the Scheme was trying to prevent.
Bava insisted that the Ngcukaitobi panel had “usurped the powers” of CMS by ordering the release of the interim report at a press conference scheduled for noon on Sunday. He argued that even though GEMS and other health care plans had responded to the group to claims made against him, he and other parties should be given an opportunity to comment on the findings made against him, before it was published The report.
“The panel has no right to publish the report,” he said, adding, “as strongly as you feel about it.”
During the panel’s investigation, several doctors accused health care companies, including Discovery and Medscheme, of racial discrimination, particularly when it came to paying doctors.
Unlike their white counterparts, black, Indian and black doctors claimed they were required to share patient files when requesting payments, an illegal violation of doctor-patient confidentiality.
Doctors also claimed that due to delay or non-payment of health care plans, some doctors had committed suicide, while others were forced to close their offices. This did not happen to his colleagues in the meantime, they said.
On Sunday, GEMS argued that the release of the interim panel report, which it says contains “scathing” findings, “would seriously and irreparably damage GEMS’s good name and reputation” and violate its “right to be heard.”
“There is no way to repair such damage once it has been inflicted,” Kruger stated in court documents.
This is a developing story.
