The Council for Medical Schemes (CMS) has this month recommended that increases to medical aid contributions for 2023 stay at or below inflation (5.7%).
The association’s latest circular found that in the context of the current economic climate – characterised by surging inflation and a rising interest rate – above inflationary contribution increases are simply unaffordable for most members of medical schemes.
“We do see that those premium increases cannot be different to between 8% and 10%, unfortunately for the next 5 or 10 years. That’s what the premiums have to be,” he said.Comrie has previously unpacked the cost of healthcare inflation in private healthcare. “At the start of the pandemic we didn’t have the vaccines, and luckily they came through relatively quickly. But these came at a cost,” he said. “Where in 2019 there was no Covid-19, in 2020 we had to pay for general treatment, hospital and pharmaceutical costs that we never saw in the previous year.”
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