Dear Editor
The Minister of Health, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, has revealed that the Department of Health has spent almost R9.7 million defending the National Health Insurance (NHI) and National Health Act (NHA), where it deals with aspects of the NHI, in court. Considering the crisis in our hospitals this money could be better spent.
This not only violates the long-standing practice of government departments abiding by court decisions and appealing same but also ignores the harm the NHI will wreak on South Africa’s health care systems.
While the Minister continues to defend the NHI by blaming the private sector and medical aids, without taking the responsibility to amend the Medical Schemes Act to better regulate the industry or answering pertinent questions about the declining state of public hospitals under his watch, nothing will change the fact that the NHI will cause more harm than good.
South Africa’s poor and vulnerable do not deserve the inhumane conditions they are regularly subjected to in the public health sector, and they further do not deserve the worsening of this through the NHI. The solution to this not solved by destroying the private health sector and subjecting the public health sector, with its crumbling and dangerous infrastructure and staff and other shortages to an influx of almost 9 million people. This is unethical to say the least.
South Africa’s poor public health quality will only be fixed if the national and provincial health departments start to take governance seriously.
Gauteng hospitals are on life support. They cannot deliver basic services like heating their wards, clean laundry, or pay their doctors’ overtime or bills. And in lieu of providing cancer treatment, they’re appealing the court judgment ordering them to do so.
Cancer patients in the Eastern Cape are also being denied cancer treatment, with the Eastern Cape Health Department failing to provide the Oncology Departments at Gqeberha’s Provincial Hospital and Livingstone Hospital with life-saving chemotherapy drugs and the Surgery Department at Livingstone Hospital being forced to shut down all its outpatient clinics due to the Department failing to fill empty posts.
In Limpopo, the public Emergency Medical Services (EMS) have all but collapsed due to the shortage of qualified ambulance crews.
The NHI will improve none of these conditions because the people in charge have learned that there are little to no consequences for their failings. Minister Motsoaledi and his Department’s head in the sand approach to holding his comrades to account have cost South Africans their dignity and their lives. And despite the Minister rhetoric, the NHI will further deteriorate their lives.
The DA believes in universal access to health care; we believe that the universal access should be of good quality. The NHI not only undermines this, but so does the Minister and his Department who keep pushing a flawed legislation while failing to hold rotten, incompetent, and corrupt millionaire managers to account and thus eroding dignity and good quality health care to millions of South Africans have not improved the lives of South Africans.
Regards
Michele Clarke MP
DA Spokesperson on Health