CAUSE AND EFFECT: The increase in lifestyle-related diseases is pushing up medical aids’ costs. Picture: Supplied
THE epidemic of healthstyle diseases, diabetes, heart disease, stroke and high blood pressure, is one of the major factors taking its toll on South African medical aids, Discovery Health chief executive Jonathan Broomberg says.
Speaking at a Discovery Health Media Summit, Broomberg said this was the major reason behind healthcare costs increasing at rates higher than the consumer price index.
“The increase in healthcare costs is a global problem. South Africa is not alone,” Broomberg said.
He said their data showed that between 2008 and 2015, consumer price inflation was about 6.3% but medical inflation was 11.4%.
“What is driving it? Apart from an aging population there is a rising tide of chronic disease,” Broomberg said.
“A lack of physical activity is the new smoking,” he said, explaining that the fast-rising numbers of people diagnosed with diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, all caused by unhealthy lifestyles, were taking its toll on medical aids.
He said Discovery Health was also experiencing a 4.6% increase in claims.
“This is not blaming the members of medical schemes,” Broomberg said.
“We are seeing that people are not staying on medical aids. Or just join a medical aid when they are about to start a family and then leave again if all is well.
“Or they will then, if the baby is ill, only keep the mom and the baby on the medical aid,” he said.
Broomberg said the biggest impact, however, was that South Africa was facing an epidemic of lifestyle diseases. “According to our data, 59% of our members have registered for chronic conditions.”
He said it was no secret that medical aids use their healthy members to subsidise the ill.
Broomberg said there had, however, mainly due to a sharp increase in people suffering lifestyle diseases, been a 21% drop in healthy non-claiming members.
Broomberg said they had been taken by surprise by the popularity and uptake of their new Vitality programme rewards system, in which members are rewarded with vouchers for Kauai or Vida e Caffe, or even a way to buy an Apple smart watch for exercising enough every week.
He said their data also showed that when people started exercising, they lived healthier lifestyles.
Broomberg said advances in the medical world had also contributed to the increase in medical aid costs.
He said at this stage they had recovered and prevented fraud of about R400-million a year, but estimated that Discovery was potentially at risk of losing as much as R1-billion to fraud.
“The more resources we throw at the problem, the more we find.”
Family medicine specialist Dr Don Papuma said doctors were seeing an incredibly worrying explosion in the numbers of obese children and patients diagnosed with sugar diabetes.
He said the impact of these diseases was very concerning.
“When I graduated and did my internship in 1990 we saw a single case of heart disease. We were convinced that lifestyle diseases were linked to affluence. We were so very wrong,” Papuma said.
Referring to the financial burden of lifestyle diseases, he said: “The minister of health has said himself that the cost of cardiovascular disease, wheelchairs and amputations [most often necessitated by diabetes] could break the public health system.”
Papuma said the good news was that everyone could save on medical costs by living a healthier life.
“If you start to exercise and stop smoking you can change your health. It is in your hands.”
Broomberg said: “It is very simple. Stop smoking and start jogging.”
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