Why doctors dislike Discovery
Doctors, perhaps Discovery’s only dissatisfied stakeholder grouping, are growing increasingly frustrated with the corporatisation of private health care
Discovery’s shareholders have every reason to smile. The stock is up 27% over the past year, on a spectacular 62% run in 2017, as the insurance group’s myriad new business ventures here and abroad bear fruit. Likewise, its Vitality-obsessed customers have enjoyed countless smoothies, coffees and, for the really committed, Apple watches on the house. Staff, meanwhile, get to work in Discovery’s brand spanking new Sandton headquarters, which reportedly cost R3bn to build. Yet for all its wow factors — and Adrian Gore’s Discovery is undeniably impressive — the sector from which it derived more than a third of its profit in 2017, health care, is fundamentally broken. And doctors, perhaps Discovery’s only dissatisfied stakeholder grouping, are growing increasingly frustrated with the corporatisation of private health care. Large medical aid administrators and private hospital groups wield "undue influence" on private health-care practitioners, says Chris Archer, a gynaecologist and CEO o...
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