General impression over many years of service

I have been a client of discovery medical aid for many years. I can still say that the people they use to respond to the public are mostly well trained and quite pleasant to deal with. The area that has declined though over the years is their actual claims payouts. In the beginning I used to submit my claims and that was that, your payout was received no hassle, no fuss. Now-a-days they literally have thousands of reason codes why they have NOT paid your claim and you then have a huge fight on your hands and many wasted hours on the phone with the service provider and Discovery. They also are very good at not telling you upfront about these little gotchas, and specific situations where they refuse to pay your claim. I have had a number of very unpleasant surprises of late.

The other area that is a huge time-waster is trying to get authorisations. I have been helping my mom to try and get an auth for a procedure that she needs to have done, and I am 3 phone calls later, and almost an hour on the phone and there is STILL information that is required that we don't yet have. It looks like Discovery is following the practice of other large businesses and corporations, where it is all about bottom line, and the inevitable result is a decline in actual service delivery.