By Di Caelers
A Robin Hood-style doctor, who defrauded medical aids of nearly R100 000 to help patients battling to pay levies, has been found guilty of unprofessional conduct by the Health Professions Council.
Former Eerste River general practitioner Christopher Leatt, who pleaded guilty to the charge, was given a suspended sentence by a council disciplinary hearing on Thursday.
He was suspended from practising for three years, but this sentence was suspended for five years.
Leatt was charged by the Health Professions Council after being found guilty in the Bellville Regional Court in June 2000 of 30 counts of submitting fraudulent claims to medical aid societies. The court fined him R30 000.
According to the court record, the fraud totalled R90 808,81.
Disciplinary committee chairman Professor J P van Niekerk said Leatt had inflated bills with fictitious items of medication, so that medical aids effectively paid patients' entire consultation bills. The fictitious medicine cancelled out the portion, or levy, patients should have paid themselves.
Leatt, who said the fraud had changed his life in every respect, including leaving him liquidated, sequestrated and facing divorce, told committee members he had not set out to commit fraud.
When he bought his former Eerste River practice he had inherited a billing system which effectively ensured patients were not charged their portion of the consultation cost. This was instead billed to their medical aids, disguised as medication.
After six months, he discovered how the system worked and put a stop to it.
"The waiting room emptied. I was in a desperate position. I had borrowed a lot of money to buy the practice and I was faced with reintroducing the old billing system which was wrong, but widely used," said Leatt.
"That was my error. In order to get patients back I needed to do what everyone in the area was doing, because my patients had gone elsewhere."
Leatt has since repaid the full amount to the medical aids concerned, paid his R30 000 court fine, and has helped set up a body aimed at expediting medical aid payments to doctors.
But Kantha Padayachee, for the Health Professions Council, said the Robin Hood theory of stealing from the rich to give to the poor could not condoned.
"There is a problem with healthcare funding in this country... and the situation is further aggravated by fraud," Padayachee said.
Van Niekerk said in sentencing Leatt that the committee took into account his full co-operation with the police when his practice was first raided, and that he pleaded guilty to the fraud charges from the start, thus accepting full responsibility.
Leatt has, since he was liquidated, returned to academic medicine where he is doing a general surgery rotation at Cape Town's state hospitals.