Experts mull ways to fund, manage National Health Insurance
To implement the NHI, South Africa will need to increase government spending on health to about five percent of the country’s gross domestic product – or economic output, according to the review. Published by the Health Systems Trust, the review’s launch was accompanied by the annual release of the District Health Barometer.
How the country will foot this bill is uncertain due to continued delays in releasing both the White Paper on the NHI as well as National’s Treasury’s NHI financing discussion document. However in his chapter for the 2013 South African Health Review, international financing expert Robert Fryatt predicted that the NHI would be accompanied by major changes in the way we fund health and how services are delivered. Already think tanks have proposed an 8 percent tax hike for the middle and upper classes, as well as payroll taxes.
In this year’s review, Fryatt co-authors a chapter with National Department of Health Director-General Precious Matsoso and argues that government could stretch resources by using a franchise model to outsource some health services to cost effectively increase access to services while improving quality.
The South African government currently uses the model to work with international reproductive health organisation Marie Stopes to provide services such as abortion in 19 clinics nationwide, he notes
Private medical must respond to social, consumer concerns to survive
With about R118 billion in contributions last year, private medical aids could also help collect revenue for the NHI – just one of the many possible roles the private sector is keen to play in the NHI, according to fellow review author and University of Cape Town actuary Shivani Ramjee.
“There is an enormous amount of openness and wanting to be involved in some way,” Ramjee told Health-e News. “We have built up immense capacity in the private sector in terms of health networks, information technology, administration…now it’s about thinking about creative ways to harness what we have moving forward.”
While she notes challenges for the sector, including escalating costs, limited coverage, and stalled industry reforms, she argues that major medical aids may be in a position to help administer the NHI and collect funds.
Major medical aids may also be able to carve out a post-NHI niche by covering services not included in a possible basic government package – just one of the creative solutions that may be able to harness private sector resources for the NHI.
“As a country, we have to be open to a variety of possible solutions and thinking to achieve what we want to achieve,” Ramjee stressed.
- Read the latest South African Health Review
- More Health-e News coverage of the District Health Barometer
An edited version of this story appeared in the 30 October edition of the Cape Times and the 3 November edition of the Daily 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.
Experts mull ways to fund, manage National Health Insurance
by lauralopez, Health-e News
October 30, 2014
Related
Quarter of surveyed health facilities report stock outs
Almost 25 percent of health facilities surveyed nationally have gone without HIV or tuberculosis (TB) medicines at least once in the last year, according to preliminary survey results released this week.
Activists picket UN meeting for access to medicines
Dozens of activists and patients picketed today outside the Johannesburg meeting of a United Nations high level panel on access to medicines. Activists have demanded governments fund more drug research and development.
One pill a day to keep HIV at bay for thousands of sex workers
One pill a day will soon help keep thousands of sex workers HIV-free as South Africa is expected to announce today that it will provide antiretrovirals to thousands HIV-negative sex workers in a bid to keep them HIV free.