NHI will ruin our healthcare
At present, 30% of our population receives excellent healthcare from the private sector and 70% dreadful healthcare from the state. The ANC doesn’t like this. It wants everyone (except, of course, rich ANC politicians) to receive dreadful state healthcare. This is the reason for NHI (National Health Insurance).
In June, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, Minister of Health, gazetted the revised White Paper on the proposed NHI. He says that existing medical schemes will “all be collapsed into a single state-run medical aid plan”. The state will run all healthcare in the same way it runs its present hospitals.
In 2014, the Office of Health Standards Compliance (OHSC) found 3% of the state health facilities it inspected to be compliant.
The IRR (Institute of Race Relations) recently published a report on NHI. It makes grim reading.
The nominal purpose of NHI is to provide universal healthcare.
The real purpose is to increase state control and provide enormous salaries for a vast army of bureaucrats, officials, commissioners and consultants. Their job will be to produce mountains of forms, lengthen the long queues, increase costs, make procurement slow and difficult, delay payment to doctors, plunge the country deeper into debt, and widen the distance between patient and doctor to a chasm.
There will be an exodus of doctors and dentists.
Appointments to NHI will be by race, political connections and cadre deployment.
The most efficient care is when the patient pays the doctor with his own money. When third parties get in the way, the system is open to fraud and over-treatment. In England I used the doctors and dentists of the National Health Service. They were awful.
Now in SA, I pay my private doctor and dentist directly in cash. Both are wonderful, the best I’ve ever had, and quite affordable.
Some people are too poor to pay, and then the state must provide. I think the best scheme is for state hospitals to be free of charge but run efficiently, with appointments on merit, and with the private sector able to design any medical aid scheme it chooses, without interference.
The huge question about NHI is where ANC politicians will go for their own healthcare. Perhaps they will do a Mugabe and fly overseas for private treatment.