Pathcare Accounts

Like the other Pathcare Accounts reviews here I can also confirm that this department is absolutely pathetic and ***********. This company does not deserve to be in business with the way they treat their customers.

Up until November 2020 I would get my accounts on time with no delay. Then I got 3 accounts for tests that my wife had gone for. The problem was that 2 of the 3 invoices did not have our Medical Aid’s name on but stated that they were “Vets Accs Direct to Owner”. So I emailed them back and asked to change them to the Medical Aid. It took a few emails back and forth with me eventually sending a copy of the invoices with the above circled to get this corrected.

What was interesting at this stage was that the same invoices had become cheaper now. One of them was 25% cheaper and the other 8%. So I submitted these to my Medical Aid and they were subsequently paid.

Two weeks later I got a statement that said that they had been overpaid by almost R700. My mistake here was that I didn’t spend much time on it and simply asked for a refund to be paid back to me. Nothing happened so I followed up with them over the period of 2 months.

Then in January 2021, I got a mail saying that I need to be refunded by an amount of almost R700 and they asked for my bank details! I sent this to them again and a day later they came back and stated that the refund must go to the medical aid.

A few weeks later I got another statement saying that I was 90 days in arrears now with my R700 that was overpaid. This is where I made my second mistake. As part of the R700 over payment the medical aid had not paid a portion of one invoice by R175 and overpaid another by R875. Hence why in net the over payment was R700.

This was in February and after that nothing was sent ever again.

Then in August I got this random text message from “MTB Attorneys” saying I must pay R233 into a bank account for my Pathcare account to avoid legal action. I checked my last emails from Pathcare and I didn’t owe them R233. This together with the fact that the text message also had spelling mistakes lead me to believe this was a hoax so I ignored the message.

A week later I got another message. This time it was all in CAPS. Now the amount was different and the name was “MTB Lawyers”. So I took the email address and typed “mtb.co.za” in my browser and came up with a page that said “Reserved for mtb.co.za”. I even did a lookup on the registration information of the domain and all the information was obscured so I couldn’t tell that this was a real business. So I concluded again that this was a **** especially since the amount was different too.

In September I got a 3rd message but this time from “Muller Terblanche & Beyers”. This time for an amount of R283. This I could google and found that there was in fact such a firm. Google had their website under www.mtb.co.za and not mtb.co.za. I phoned them and found out that this was in fact in respect of the R175 portion that the medical aid had not paid. The additional amount of over R100 they added on were their costs for 3 text messages, one missed call and “commissions”. I paid them later that morning as it was clearly a case of it’s an open account for them to use with “costs” going up daily.

So I went back to Pathcare and got an updated statement. Surprisingly 6 months later they hadn’t refunded the amount they owe to the medical aid.

In fact there was an invoice from June 2021 which had a part payment from the medical aid. So I in fact owed them money again which is fine, but what is not fine is that almost 90 days later after this invoice I haven’t been sent a statement again. So the cycle continues.

Since then I’ve asked them why an I not getting sent statements when I owe them money. I’ve also asked them to send me a copy of an invoice that the medical aid said they received electronically but isn’t showing up on my statements from Pathcare to explain the over payment. Every email back from them avoids this invoice and I get sent old invoices. They clearly don’t read messages and interacting with them is completely fruitless.