Editor:
My wife and I are visiting relatives in Cape Town and she picked up a bug that required medical attention.
Her resident sister suggested that my wife see her doctor here in downtown Cape Town. At 11 a.m. she called for an appointment, got one for 1:45 p.m. the same day. She saw the doctor in an unhurried appointment for about 20 minutes. The doctor prescribed a series of prescriptions and advised a chest X-ray. She wrote up a requisition for the procedure and we travelled up the elevator to the radiology department, waited 10 minutes until she was called, and five minutes later she was done. We went down to the pharmacy and had the prescriptions (five of them) filled.
We then went for a late lunch, and at 3:15 p.m. the doctor called to advise us that the X-ray was negative.
All of this had taken an hour and a half. But how much did this private medical care cost, you might ask? The doctor’s appointment cost R500, the X-ray R570 and the five prescriptions R590. Total cost in Canadian dollars, approximately $183 or not much more than our MSP premiums.
Do you think there might be something to be learned here?
Brian Smith, Halfmoon Bay
