Futurist Peter Diamandis has predicted that by 2025 the planet will have 8 billion hyper-connected humans. The Internet of Things will have exploded to over 100 billion connected devices and the global healthcare industry and its established business models will be crushed by startups and data giants, such as Google and Apple, through robotics, artificial intelligence and large-scale genome sequencing.
That is also the year in which South Africa's National Health Insurance (NHI) fund is targeted to be implemented.
If the government is able to deliver the essential healthcare for all described in the white paper on NHI by then, the portion of the population who are members of medical schemes, last year estimated by Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi at 16%, will shrink.
Warwick Bam, insurance analyst at Avior Capital Markets, says "it will be a threat" to medical schemes as we know them.
Discovery, which covers 2.78 million people with the country's largest health medical scheme with a 56% market share, and which manages more than 3.4 million lives as administrator, could take a knock.
NHI would not be something of which South Africans could opt out, whether they use public services or not. Those who continue to pay premiums to medical schemes will pay for healthcare twice...