Dear Editor
The DA notes National Treasury’s intention to levy additional taxes on hard-working South Africans to fund the National Health Insurance (NHI).
The projected financial impacts of the NHI are alarming and estimates have reached as high as R859 billion per annum. Since the introduction of the NHI Bill, the government has remained elusive about its funding. The Treasury has now indicated plans to hike taxes, by an undetermined amount, to finance the impractical and destined-to-fail NHI.
The South African economy is already beset by one of the most onerous tax regimes in the world and any tax increase will be unduly burdensome, highly regressive, and disproportionately impact lower-income households.
South Africans are already battling a cost-of-living crisis without any relief from government – that could very easily cut fuel taxes and expand the zero-vat-rated food basket. Yet, the government’s indifference is palpable, especially as they consider tax increases while many citizens struggle to meet basic needs.
Governmental impositions on income, consumption, and property ownership, aggravated by public resource mismanagement through waste, corruption, and embezzlement, have eroded public trust significantly. The ANC’s intensified efforts to hike taxes to fund their populism therefore warrant collective opposition. Taxpayers must realise that their contributions are squandered by an indifferent and morally bankrupt dispensation that needs money to finance its patronage networks, not service delivery.
The DA’s position is clear. We remain committed to the principle of universal access to healthcare for all citizens. But the NHI Bill is unconstitutional and will only serve to further erode an already ailing national public health sector.
Government’s model of centralising all healthcare funding into a new state-owned entity in which private sector resources and state resources will be merged into a single funding pool controlled by the Minister of Health is a recipe for disaster.
Instead, our model, presented in the DA’s Manifesto and healthcare policy documents, outlines how sustainable access to healthcare can be achieved by fixing the current district management model through governance reform. By leveraging the strengths of the private sector in partnership with the public sector, a DA government will provide access to high quality healthcare for every South African, without increasing the tax burden.
The Bill now awaits President Ramaphosa’s signature. While the President has been looking for his pen to sign it into law, the DA has sought legal counsel and stands ready to oppose this draconian legislation that threatens to bar access to quality healthcare for South Africans.
Regards
Dr Dion George MP
DA Shadow Minister of Finance
Knight Light
Fun South African Fact: The world’s largest diamond was found in the Premier Mine in Pretoria, South Africa on 25 January 1905.
Kabuki
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.