President Cyril Ramaphosa’s public call for support for the National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme as a means of securing ‘quality healthcare’ is deceiving when his own government is responsible for chronic failures in the existing extensive public health system, the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) has said.
In a statement, the IRR said: ‘Judged against the outcome of NHI trials that have delivered appalling results at great expense to the taxpayer, Ramaphosa’s claim that the de facto nationalisation of all medical care through NHI can deliver quality healthcare has no basis in reality.’
The president said in his televised address to the country on Sunday: ‘Let us lay the foundation for National Health Insurance so that all people have access to the quality health care they need regardless of their ability to pay.’
The IRR said the president made clear ‘the willingness of the SACP-ANC government to exploit the hardship and anxiety brought on by the Covid-19 crisis to score political points, and to justify the government’s plans to intrude deeper into the lives of citizens’.
It pointed out: ‘To begin with, South Africa already has an extensive public health system charged with delivering quality healthcare, particularly to the vulnerable and the poor, but it is failing, and costing lives. Instances of grievous mismanagement, and of patients or loved ones enduring what can only be described as inhumane treatment, are commonplace. These are symptoms of chronic government failure.
‘But the same government is intent on taking over the entire medical sector in South Africa. Rather than focusing on solutions that would guarantee quality healthcare in the public sector, President Ramaphosa’s government risks merely importing into NHI everything that is wrong with the system it mismanages today.’
IRR Deputy Head of Policy Research Hermann Pretorius said that while the government was already responsible for ‘providing quality healthcare to those who cannot afford private medical care or coverage, it is failing at immense cost not only to taxpayers, but to patients and their loved ones’.
‘The NHI is not a cure-all – in fact, it is likely to be worse than the disease it is trying to cure: too many South Africans not having access to quality healthcare. If government-run healthcare has shown South Africans one thing, it is that government cannot successfully run healthcare.’
Over the past decade, the government ‘has increasingly implemented laws and regulations that have unnecessarily pushed up the costs of private healthcare, callously pricing people out of access to the quality care the private sector supplies’.
He said: ‘The Covid-19 lockdown crisis has shown once again that the best hope for South Africans is healthcare not run by the government.’