President Cyril Ramaphosa says every South African will be covered under the National Health Insurance (NHI) by 2025.
He says government will forge ahead with the plans to implement the NHI to provide equal access to quality health care for all South Africans regardless of their financial status.
Ramaphosa has been speaking at the National Health Insurance and Medical Schemes Amendment Bill Stakeholder Consultative Meeting in Pretoria.
The NHI is a health financing system that pools funds to provide access to quality health services, for all South Africans, based on their health needs and irrespective of their socio-economic status.
President Ramaphosa says there’s no doubt that the country needs the NHI.
“It is inconceivable that anyone today could argue against the need for every South African to have access to healthcare services on the basis of need and not on their ability to pay. It is therefore a duty of a democratic and progressive government to create policies that ensure that every South African can have access to quality healthcare and not just rich people.”
He says there’s an urgent need to address the challenges in the public health sector such as the shortage of staff, backlog of theatre operations and poor management.
“We need to use this meeting to exchange ideas on how we can address the severe shortage of essential employees such as doctors and nurses, and support staff such as radiographers including potters and many others. Our health professionals who constitute the backbone of the healthcare system have often indicated that they are overworked and they feel exploited as a result of staff shortages occasioned by the exodus of their colleagues to the private sector.”
Ramaphosa says they will root out corruption and strengthen governance systems ahead of the implementation of the NHI.
“Corruption has embedded itself in yes in our public health system. We’ve got to root out corruption in the public health care system and make sure that the thieves and sometimes we just call them corrupt people, they are thieves, they are robbers, they are fleecing the public of the money that should go to making sure that we have a proper health care system and we are going to root them out.”
Health minister, Aaron Motsoaledi, says the foundation for the NHI is to improve quality of care in the public sector and to reduce the exorbitant cost of private healthcare. He says the country needs to change the way it tackles corruption.
“One of the main mistakes why corruption is flourishing is because all our methods of fighting corruption are post morterm if you understand what I mean. everything that we do in SA to fight corruption is post morterm. Can’t we do something before because we are doing a preventative healthcare. Can’t we also do preventative corruption watch and say under NHI this is what we will do to make it impossible to steal in the first place?”.
Motsoaledi says they’ve received over a thousand submissions to the National Health Insurance Bill.
