Freedom from NHI: Implement tax-funded health-care vouchers, says IRR

4 September 2024

The National Health Insurance (NHI) poses a threat to South Africans’ health-care freedom. The latest #WhatSACanBe paper, Health: Expand Access, Enrich Families, shows how better health-care solutions can remove that risk.

Rather than telling voters how the government intended addressing medicine and resource shortages, long queues, failing equipment and chronic understaffing in public health facilities, President Cyril Ramaphosa instead opted just days before the May election to sign the NHI Bill into law. This places South Africans’ health-care freedom in danger.

In contrast, the IRR’s latest #WhatSACanBe paper proposes that the Government of National Unity (GNU) give South Africans tax-funded health-care vouchers to spend on treatment at either public or private facilities. This will help to relieve the pressure on state hospitals and ultimately create conditions for competition and further innovation in the health-care sector.

Says IRR researcher Chris Patterson: “The freedom to choose health-care providers is a matter of life and death. As a result of the failing public health system, the differences between public and private health care have become ever starker. The solution is not to subject everyone to sub-par health care, but to give them the freedom to choose – and to help the public system reform itself from being a burden to becoming a sustainable service that makes South Africans healthier.”

The paper further proposes doing away with prescribed minimum benefits, which will allow members to choose their cover, as well as allowing low-cost medical schemes, opening the market up to millions of South Africans who are victims of the failing public health system.

Patterson says the Health Minister should:

·        Step away from NHI;

·        Fix public health care, and

·        Make quality private health care accessible to more South Africans.

Giving South Africans the freedom to choose their health care through tax-funded vouchers is the answer to making it all about #WhatSACanBe.

The latest paper can be read here.

Issued by Michael Morris, Head of Media, IRR, 4 September 2024