I saw that the Democratic Alliance, in the name of Greg Krumbock, issued a press release about the Road Accident Fund’s deficit which did not get much coverage, but seems to have gone out on 11 October 2012. The DA wants to improve the speed of payments to injured persons by allowing them to submit all their claims electronically at hospitals, which seems to ignore the entire process of obtaining medico legal reports and investigating how the injuries affect somebody’s life differently and in different circumstances.

They want to introduce a “different management model for this Fund” which pretty much sounds like most of Mitt Romney’s plans for America – anything that Obama has done is incorrect, but he is not going to be mentioning what the plan is and likewise the DA is not advising what their actual plan is. The one thing that they have picked up on is that they say, “Output per staff member has gone down and the claims processing has slowed.” This is something that we (attorneys) have been saying for years, and much of the Road Accident Fund’s work is now “outsourced” by them to their own attorneys. Certainly, if they started using tenders and offers, particularly with suppliers’ claims, from the minute they are lodged with the RAF, they could reduce their costs considerably, but if the DA or anybody else wants to assist the Road Accident Fund I would imagine that the best way to do so is to tackle the problem of the suppliers’ claims, and to ensure that costs don’t get out of hand by making offers in matters sooner than they are now. In that regard I would bring in a specialised legal team, involving perhaps attorneys or even advocates on a contractual basis who have experience in this field of law and let them advise the Road Accident Fund on generous and quick tenders in matters so that legal costs do not have to be incurred, as they are now. The vast majority of the Road Accident Fund’s expenses could be reduced if only the Road Accident Fund got back to its job of actually settling cases.