Last week, the Council for Medical Schemes (CMS) issued a circular to indicate that stakeholder meetings for the prescribed minimum benefits (PMB) review process, which was announced in December 2017, will be postponed until further notice. This was due to Department of Health stakeholder meetings on National Health Insurance (NHI) that need to be finalised first. The PMB review process, generally, was also announced so that PMBs could be aligned with national health policies such as the NHI. Historically, PMBs were included as regulations under the Medical Schemes Act of 2003. The idea behind PMBs was to prevent catastrophic health expenses on conditions that were expensive to treat and going untreated could lead to death or disability. The Medical Schemes Act also legislated that PMBs need to be reviewed every two years. The last PMB review was in 2010 and the Department of Health did not accept the results. Its reasons for this have not been made public. The industry was thus ver...
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