Reports that the government is delaying implementation of National Health Insurance (NHI), pending a Constitutional Court ruling, are good news — even if this may be only temporary relief from the insanity that is NHI. (“Ramaphosa pledges not to activate NHI law pending top court ruling”, February 20).
It has also been reported that medical aid tax credits are unlikely to be scrapped anytime soon, with finance minister Enoch Godongwana publicly recognising that scrapping this relief would “effectively be an attack on the middle class”, who pay most of South Africa’s personal income tax. More good news.
NHI, designed to introduce universal healthcare, is unlikely to improve healthcare. More likely it would disrupt and wreck healthcare entirely, public and private.
It is a totalitarian scheme straight out of the Soviet copybook which ignores the views of 10-million middle-class South Africans, who would be deprived of the healthcare they currently pay for out of their own pockets.
In so doing they significantly reduce the burden on the public healthcare system, which is already in a state of collapse after 30 years of looting and mismanagement on the ANC’s watch.
The private healthcare sector is one of the best-managed sectors in the economy. Why destroy what works when the alternative — public healthcare — is an unmitigated disaster?
NHI would transform healthcare into a gigantic state-owned enterprise, with the clear intention that the ANC runs it, especially its so-called NHI Fund. It is the brainchild of atavistic ideology.
The degree of centralisation implicit in the scheme is anti-democratic and unconstitutional, susceptible to mismanagement, and will be “vulnerable to grand corruption at the expense of the nation’s entire health system”, as basic education minister Siviwe Gwarube said when she was still on parliament’s health portfolio committee.
We have seen all of this before.
François Theron
Pretoria
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