Tag: Professor Robert W Vivian

As a result of the collapse of almost every government service and state owned enterprise, South Africans are perforce increasingly seeking ways to avoid or replace government services. State insurers have also failed.

Brokers are a feature of the medical schemes market and subject to extensive regulation in terms of the Medical Schemes Act, its regulations, and circulars issued by the Council for Medical Schemes (CMS). The CMS has announced it intends to revise Circular 20 of 2010, the prevailing circular dealing with brokers and has called for public comment.

Fixing prices is not the terrain of the Financial Services Conduct Authority (FSCA). In a recently published article, my colleague Dr Brian Benfield called for the outright abolition of regulatory price fixing with regard to the distribution of insurance products (i.e. insurance commission regulation Biznews). Indeed, it is astonishing that these regulations still exist.

In 1985 the South African insurance industry voluntarily launched the Ombudsman for Long Term Insurance system. The Ombudsman for Short Term Insurance (OSTI) was launched some four years later in 1989. These bodies operated independently and separately from one another until last year.

The executives of Momentum insurance appeared recently to have been coerced under popular pressure into making payment of a void policy, thereby upending over 250 years of sound global application of the common law.

The problem of inappropriate labelling is not confined to law. It is appearing in the financial services market which should take deliberate steps to resist incorrect labelling, particularly by regulators.

It seems the African National Congress (ANC) is determined to press ahead with the expropriation of property without compensation. This raises a number of constitutional questions.