Discovery Health deciding that my little girls qualified doctor does not know how best to treat her.

My little girl was admitted to hospital in December last year after falling very ill whilst we where on holiday. The doctors could unfortunately not figure out what was wrong with her and when we eventually got her to the third doctor in our home town she had ordered a PCR testing to be done as this would be the fastest way to determine what exactly we where up against.

This test takes hours instead of days and in this case determines whether the problem is a virus or bacterial infection. Once this can be determined it also means that you can insure that the correct care is given for the illness. An example of this would be that you can't fight a virus with antibiotics as antibiotics only work for bacterial infections.

The ordinary way of getting these tests done are to have your blood tested by a lab and the way they do the tests takes a few days. The PCR testing is a new and groundbreaking method that has only recently been introduced to South Africa. There have been many studies done on the new technology and all of these point to quicker turn around times to determine what is wrong with a patient in certain conditions mostly related to respiratory problems when in hospital as was the case with my little girl. These studies also show that your time in hospital is dramatically reduced as you will be able to start getting the correct treatment sooner and thus be able to go home sooner as well. With this current COVID 19 situation it also reduces the risk of being exposed to the Covid 19 virus whilst in hospital which in it's own makes it a excellent choice to determine what is wrong with a patient and that is why medical doctors prefer using this method.

Here is where my utter disappointment in Discovery Health begins. We have been members of Discovery Health for as long as I can recall. But when the bill for this testing was sent to Discovery they refused to pay it as according to them "due to the limited clinical evidence submitted by the supplier and consequently the technology not being validated through an internal health technology assessment.".

Not withstanding that this is a recognized testing method used in other first world country's, or the fact that a qualified medical doctor insisted on the testing to be done in this case. Who are they to decide that it is not to be used? Then when I rep**** to them and asked them when they had sent this communication through to me as there client or had informed me of the change in any way they did not as much as even reply to acknowledge the receipt of the email. That email was sent on the 20th of January 2021.

How can this be expectable in any way? I will be considering moving everything I currently have away from Discovery. I have been on Diamond status for quite some time and also have my life, short term, businesses life insurance and annuities with Discovery. But if this is how they treat costumers then my odd R 20 000 will be looking for a new company who might value my money more.