Fraud against medical aid schemes is a massive problem everywhere. But this is South Africa, so there is an additional aspect to the issue. And that is, you guessed it, race. An organisation for medical professionals has made the explosive allegation that SA's top medical aids are guilty of racial profiling in their efforts to combat medical aid fraud. But is it racial profiling or just one more sad example of SA's skewed society?

All insurance companies face a high level of fraud, but it's a little-known fact that it's an extreme problem for medical aid schemes. Recently at the Council for Medical Schemes' inaugural Fraud, Waste and Abuse Summit, it was estimated that fraudulent practices cost members somewhere between R22-billion and R28-billion a year.

That would constitute about 25% of all premiums paid by SA's 8.8 million medical aid members. Or to put it another way, if there were no fraud, your medical aid bill would come down by a quarter, and given the way they have been escalating that would be a very welcome discount.

SA's largest medical aid scheme, Discovery, for example, investigates about 3,500 potential fraud cases a year, and 82% of them turn out to...