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BL Premium reports that in a failure that could intensify concerns about the administration of the proposed National Health Insurance (NHI), the Department of Employment and Labour’s Compensation Fund has not settled most of its bills since October 2019.
This is because the Fund’s new website to record accidents and lodge claims has been dysfunctional since that date. The multi-billion-rand government fund compensates doctors and therapists for treating injured workers. Health professionals say the payments failure is putting "workers’ lives at risk". The Compensation Fund is the legal model for the NHI fund, which aims to pay for the health care of all South Africans though a state-run medical aid. On 15 August 2019, the Fund stopped accepting new claims and then shut its old website in mid-September. The new site has only worked sporadically since November. A letter dated 8 December from the compensation commissioner, Vuyo Mafata, to health professionals admitted there had been problems with the site, and difficulties at the State Information Technology Agency, which hosts it. "Manual and electronic processing of invoices had started and service providers should start seeing an improvement in payment," Mafata advised. But lawyers and health professionals say the site is not working, which means that medical invoices cannot be processed. In respect of the five months during which the site has experienced problems, the fund could possibly owe more than R2bn. If, as it asserts, it has paid out R500m over that time, that could leave R1.5bn outstanding.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Katharine Child at BusinessLive (paywall access only)
Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page