Landmark ruling troubling for doctors

Namibia’s highest court has ruled that medical aid ‘benchmark tariffs’ indicating appropriate range of fees that patients may be charged, are legal. These tariffs do not infringe Competition Commission legislation and could in fact serve to benefit both the public interest and consumers, say the judges of the Supreme Court. Legal writer Carmel Rickard, in her A Matter of Justice column on the Legalbrief site, looks at the new judgment which overturns a contentious decision of the High Court handed down last year. At the start of this long-running litigation battle, a number of doctors and other health professionals predicted that if the tariffs were upheld, Namibia could see many of them quitting the country’s rural areas – and perhaps leaving Namibia altogether – because they were not being adequately compensated under the tariffs proposed by the funds.