Massive shake-up of health laws ahead of NHI
Parliament will need to amend at least 12 Acts to facilitate the introduction of National Health Insurance (NHI), according to Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi.
“You might have to dismantle some of the relationships between spheres of government and also rattle the corporate world in health,” Motsoaledi told the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) yesterday (19 June).
Tomorrow, the Minister is to due to release to the public two Bills – the Medical Schemes Amendment Bill and the NHI Bill – that begin the process of establishing a single universal health system for all South Africans.
“Under NHI, the rich will subsidise the poor. The young will subsidise the old. The healthy will subsidise the sick. The urban will subsidise the rural,” said Motsoaledi in his Budget speech in the NCOP.
Massive re-organisation
“[This] will necessitate a massive re-organisation of the whole healthcare system, both public and private, and completely change the relationship between our spheres of government, but also change the relationship between the rich and the poor.”
He told Members of Parliament that they would need to change “most of the laws that you have painstakingly cobbled together since the advent of democracy… We have already identified 12 Acts that will have to be amended by this House to accommodate NHI.”
He said that MPs would need to pay special attention to “the four issues that have emerged as destabilisers of the health care system”, namely:
- Human Resources: Who has the power to hire who, where, and how many
- Financial Management: No proper financial management, no services
- Procurement and Supply Chain Management
- Maintenance of Infrastructure and equipment.
“All the major disasters in health that occurred in our country are about these four and the way they are governed and controlled,” said Motsoaledi. “Life Esidimeni, oncology in KwaZulu-Natal, Mediosa and Buthelezi ambulances and the issue of shortage of staff stem from these four.” – Health-e News.
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Massive shake-up of health laws ahead of NHI
by kerrycullinan, Health-e News
June 20, 2018