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How SA consumers rate medical aids

Cape Town - The health insurance industry is seeing a change in the leading brand for the first time in three years, according to the South African Customer Satisfaction Index (SAcsi).

Liberty Health moved from a below par performance in 2014 to being named as industry leader this year by a sample of 2 105 private medical aid policyholders.

They also gave the health insurance industry a satisfaction score of 74.2 out of 100.

This overall satisfaction score is in line with other insurance products released in the past two months, which indicated slightly higher satisfaction with short term and life insurance brands in South Africa.

The six companies included in the Medical Aids survey were Bonitas, Discovery Health, Liberty Health, Medihelp, GEMS and Momentum Health based on their market share.

Liberty scored an industry-leading 76.9 out of 100. Momentum Health, Bonitas and Discovery Health scored on par with industry at 75.6, 75.2 and 74.1 out of 100 respectively. Medihelp and GEMS scored below par at 70.7 and 67.5 respectively.

SAcsi looked at satisfaction with the three types of medical plans: comprehensive, network schemes and hospital plans.

This showed that customers on comprehensive plans were more satisfied (76.1) than those on hospital plans (72.2) or network options (70.3). Customers who have experienced rejected claims report dramatically lower overall satisfaction levels of 63.3.

Prof Adrè Schreuder, CEO of Consulta and founder of SAcsi, noted that overall perceived values are low.

“Private healthcare in South Africa is becoming a grudge purchase, so these companies should be looking to actively improve the perceived value scores,” he cautioned.

Given the fact that customer expectations remain high, he noted that it is concerning that all of the brands fail to meet expectations in terms of reliability as they report that things go wrong more often than expected.

Schreuder said this may be due to the fact that as a relatively expensive product, customers have high expectations of medical aids.

“GEMS customers reported the lowest perceived quality scores. Momentum, Bonitas and Discovery Health scored on par with the industry average and Liberty is leading the market.”

However, he added that medical aids schemes are working to reduce the number of complaints and improve how they are handled, as evidenced by significantly fewer complaints.

“Medical aids are a high touch industry, meaning that there is a lot of interaction with the brands. Liberty has reported less than half the number of complaints since last year, reducing this from 23% of customers to 10.4% of customers.

"In addition, they improved how complaints are handled. Momentum has the highest score in the industry when it comes to handling complaints satisfactorily,” said Schreuder.

Consulta, which holds a licence with the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), found that South African healthcare providers compare favourably with their counterparts in the US and Singapore.

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