SIU takes aim at ballooning dodgy medical litigation that is costing the government billions

Parliament heard the Special Investigating Unit’s head advocate last week testify about medico-legal fraud. Archive photo: Ashraf Hendricks / GroundUp

• The Special Investigating Unit described to Parliament last week how it is cracking down on dodgy medical legal claims.
  
• Payouts of medical related claims were R265m in 2013. This skyrocketed to R2.7bn in 2023.
  
• The SIU says it has uncovered evidence of law firms making fraudulent claims and it has stopped about R3bn of such claims.
  
• It described one law firm in the Eastern Cape as doing “cut-and-paste” litigation.

Payments of medical related legal claims (medico-legal) against the Department of Health ballooned to R2.7bn in 2023. In 2013, it was R265m. This is according to the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) when it briefed the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) last week.

SIU head advocate Andy Mothibi told Scopa it found evidence of collusion between attorneys, touts, nurses and doctors, in both public and private healthcare. Some law firms also withdrew claims when the SIU started investigating them. This had stopped about R3bn in fraudulent claims, he said.

Claims under investigation included those targeting families with children born with cerebral palsy, false claims of medical malpractice in state hospitals, and collusion between state healthcare workers and rogue lawyers to unlawfully secure private medical records to initiate claims against the government.

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They uncovered cases of agents of rogue law firms impersonating officials of the South African Social Security Agency to secure powers of attorney on behalf of victims by claiming to be securing them social grants. He said they found two attorneys pursuing identical claims for the same individual in two different courts, and for vastly different amounts, in one case for R7.5m and R25m for the same patient and same condition.

Mothibi said the health sector experienced an explosion of medical practice litigation cases in 2015, directed against health institutions and individual medical practitioners in both public and private practice.

Mothibi said in one case a claimant demanded R70m for a supposedly botched circumcision at a Limpopo hospital when no circumcision had been performed.

In 2017, the SIU started targeting provinces with the highest share of claims. At that stage, the Eastern Cape’s contingent liability for medico-legal claims was R15.9bn; in Gauteng, it was R21.2bn.

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In the Eastern Cape, most medico-legal claims emanated from one Johannesburg-based law firm, Nonxuba Attorneys Incorporated. In five years, from 2012 to 2017, the firm submitted 44 claims totaling R497m against the provincial health department. Nine claims for children born with cerebral palsy were identical with each demanding R15m.

“This was suspicious and indicated a lot of cut-and-paste on the part of this legal firm,” said Mothibi.

The company has, according to Mothibi’s presentation, been charged.

GroundUp has been unable to get hold of Nonxuba Attorneys and Business Day has previously reported that the company’s owner, Zuko Nonxuba, has been suspended from legal practice.

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Also, in the Mthatha High Court claims increased from 46 to 529 between 2010 and 2016. There was collusion, said Mothibi, between some officials in the Office of the State Attorney, whereby out-of-court settlements for hefty sums were entered into without the mandate or even the knowledge of the department.

MP Veronica Mente-Nkuna (EFF) wanted to know the names of the legal firms implicated besides Nonxuba Attorneys and what the legal bodies have done about their operating licenses.

She asked why the Department of Health had not conducted its investigations before the claims were paid. Who was responsible for the loss of money through these fraudulent claims, she asked.

This article was originally published on GroundUp.

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