An acting high court judge threw out Genesis’s defamation case against the Council for Medical Schemes on Tuesday and rebuked the medical scheme for engaging in time-wasting and costly litigation. Acting Judge Norman Davis dismissed Genesis’s case before the High Court in Pretoria, after the scheme petitioned the court to compel the regulator to remove "defamatory statements" from its website. At the heart of the dispute is the council’s intimation on its website that Genesis might have contravened the law by failing to comply with a Supreme Court of Appeal judgment on prescribed minimum benefits. In a news letter published on the council’s site in January, it wrote: "The scheme continues to disregard the court pronouncement and still declines funding members’ accounts for services rendered in private hospitals." This prompted Genesis to institute its application. Davis said that while it might be defamatory to allege that a scheme was acting contrary to statutory provisions, such a...

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