Health Ministry attacks NHI critics


“We have no doubt that enemies of NHI will do everything possible to try to stop NHI from becoming a reality, failing which, they will try to cast doubt and aspersions on the integrity of the process,” according to the ministry statement issued this afternoon (28 November).
“We wish to reassure the nation that no law is being breached nor any illegality or irregularity committed in the manner in which the legislative process towards realisation of NHI is being conducted between the Department of Health, its officials, the Treasury, The Presidency and the rest of government.”
This follows a week of media reports about apparent breeches in protocol in the development of the latest version of the Bill, which was submitted to Cabinet’s social development sub-committee yesterday.
Leaked letter
Last week, a letter written by acting Director General of Treasury, Ismail Momoniat, to NHI Presidential advisor Dr Olive Shisana was leaked to the media. In it, Momoniat said that Treasury could not support the latest version of the Bill as it had been “very substantively amended in October”, removing various agreements reached between the Ministers of Finance and Health.
After the publication of the leaked letter, Treasury said “we have reached agreement on most of the major issues,” and “we are confident that we will soon publish this important Bill for tabling in Parliament.”
The Ministry described as “sinister” the “leaking of such letters to the media by some unscrupulous officials and then pretending that they uncovered some hidden evil lurking in government departmental exchanges”.
On Monday, civil society organisations said that the three-month comment period on the Bill had been too short, and called on Cabinet to “send the NHI Bill back to the Department of Health and to require a proper and thorough consultation process and consideration of options available for improvement of access to and quality of health care services in the country”.
The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), SECTION27, Rural Health Advocacy Project (RHAP), People’s Health Movement (PHM) and Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) also said that the current Bill “risks damage to the functional elements of the health system – public and private” and that “government needs to focus on fixing the crises in private and public health rather than on hastily passing legislation that, in its current state, takes the country in the wrong direction”.
Public hearings
But the Ministry said that the Health Minister had already explained that “whatever outstanding issue that could not be raised through public participation within that period of three months will still be achieved when Parliament conducts public hearings throughout the length and breadth of our country. Such public hearings are still coming.”
It also explained that the Presidency was driving the NHI at the request of the health minister because “NHI is a huge seismic event which will need the guidance of the Head of State”.
“NHI is not just an ordinary government programme. It is a flagship programme of the state which is designed to ensure that we deliver on our constitutional mandate of Health as a right of all citizens regardless of their station in life,” said the Ministry.
“Ever since the United Nations adopted the concept of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) as one of the 17 world’s sustainable development goals, in all major democracies of the world, Heads of State have taken over the responsibility of being the major advocates and drivers of the process towards the achievement of Universal Health Coverage which in our country is NHI. It will be remiss for our Presidency to stay aloof from such a major world endeavour.” – Health-e News.
Author
-
Kerry Cullinan is the Managing Editor at Health-e News Service. Follow her on Twitter @kerrycullinan11
View all posts
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.
Health Ministry attacks NHI critics
by Kerry Cullinan, Health-e News
November 28, 2018