Private health care is growing increasingly out for reach of anyone outside the top income brackets: medical specialists are charging what they like and getting away with it because they are in high demand and, becoming scarcer as more of them leave the country; liability cover for certain specialisations such as obstetrics has become prohibitive and new-generation, hi-tech treatments and drugs for cancer and other life-threatening conditions are costing in the hundreds of thousands, even millions of rand.
Medical schemes are battling to keep pace with these
