Fraudulent claims cost the medical industry billions

The medical industry is losing billions of rand a year due to fraudulent claims by doctors, dentists, pharmacists and optometrists. Healthcare funders say fraud is costing the industry up to 12-billion rands a year. They are now clamping down, with more than two-thousand cases being investigated by the forensics management unit, a division of the Board of Healthcare Funders. One of the examples quoted in The Star is a Mthatha doctor charged with almost one-and-a-half thousand counts of fraud and more than one-thousand-700 counts of theft, amounting to over 900-thousand rands.