Bonitas Medical Scheme and Marara Pharmacy

Good day I want to present the relevant parties and the public my experience and complaints regarding the service of Bonitas Medical aid especially their use of Marara Pharmacy. My family’s been a member of Bonitas Medical Scheme from 1970 (When the scheme was known as the Iscor Medical Fund). I am 72 and a pensioner with my wife and disabled son as dependents. The quality of service of Bonitas has declined considerably as time goes by. The problems we experience at this stage are as follow: 1. The employees of the two organisations is the most *********** and least helpful I have ever came across in my whole life. 2. Bonitas keep on reducing their benefits and raising costs while they force us to make use of Marara Pharmacy for our chronic medicine, if not you accumulate co-payments of 40%. 3. Marara Pharmacy always (from January 2025) have excuses for not having our chronic medicine ready on time (like backlogs, scripts not on system or due to overload of scripts - although our renewal scripts are with them for 3 weeks, to some medications out of stock). Medicine for heart conditions and bi-polar mood disorder that can cause a patient to relapse and may end up that the person land in a rehabilitation center for a month with an enormous amount of inconvenience and unnecessary costs. Contacting the pharmacy is a waste of time. The waiting time on a call can range from 20 minutes to 3 hours. There is no way to get hold of someone in a senior position (although asking to talk to a senior or manager, no response). Maybe they are afraid that their incompetence will also show. All you get from the person on the other end of the line is that your complaint/enquiry will be escalated or that the relevant person will call back. Needless to say, none of this ever happen. 4. As we are forced by Bonitas to use Marara Pharmacy, (to not accumulate co-payments off 40%) we contacted Bonitas Medical Scheme to help resolve the above mentioned problems. Regardless to say, nothing positive comes from this efforts. They only pass the problem back to the patient and make useless promises.