I am absolutely done with Unity Health

This is going to be a long rant, so...

TL:DR: Unity changed their policies without properly notifying me, and now I am in debt of R1300.00.

So just as a background, the old medical aid I was on before joining Unity allowed us to have ONE doctor, and if you would like to go to a different one, you needed to call them up for authorization first. I assumed Unity worked the same way so I called them up back in December 2023 to notify them that I'll be visiting a different doctor, if I need authorization and if they could maybe set this new doctor as my default doctor.

The lady from customer services informed that Unity Health does not operate like that and I am free to visit any doctor on their network without calling up and that I don't need authorization. I remember thinking, "Wow this is cool. Much better than my previous medical aid."

So I proceeded to visit my new doctor, which went fine, but due to my illness, I needed follow up visits to check if the medication was taking effect. I visited the doctor in February, March and April. Each time I visited I received an SMS from Unity, letting me know that they have received the claim from my doctor. That's it.

Recently I received a call from my doctor saying I should contact my medical aid because for all 3 of those visits, the claims were rejected.

Now I was only notified that the claims were received but never got notified that the claims were rejected. I checked the Unity Health app and confirmed that they were indeed rejected.

Today I called Unity Health and they said that their policies have changed and that apparently, for each and every doctors visit from 2024, you now need to call them first for authorization.

To my best knowledge I was not aware of this policy change.

According to the consultant, they notified us via email and SMS but after checking my emails and SMS's I could not find it anywhere.

My problem is that Unity has my personal email address and my cell phone number and for a policy change as important as this, I feel that they did not put in the necessary effort to get this communicated to me, a "valued customer".

I asked the consultant if there was perhaps any way they got backdate the authorizations just for those as I was honestly unaware and that moving forward I'll call up and he kept just saying there's nothing that can be done, and basically framing this as me being at fault.

"We did notify you, we did notify you, we did notify you..."

He said he SMS'd me but the only SMS's I received were the ones I mentioned above and a message advising me to get my flu shot.

I am absolutely furious as I need to visit my doc for a new repeat for my prescription meds but I wont be able to do this unless I pay what is owed.

The only reason I took out medical aid is so that I can have peace of mind that when I need to visit a doc, I can. But now it feels like that security was taken away.

If this cannot be resolved I will be looking at other medical aid options.

End of rant.