DG: Health budgets first to go when crises hit
Addressing the plenary at the 3rd People’s Health Assembly Matsoso said that while the country was supposed to be rolling out National Health Insurance (NHI), it had to do so with only R11-million per pilot district from Treasury.
‘Social services should not suffer when there is a crisis, the opposite should happen. But we see that when there is a financial crisis, there is a cut in social spending and health,’ she said.
Last week Professor Di McIntyre, who is also a key NHI advisor to the health minister, reiterated that NHI was about the comprehensive reform of the health system.
She said one of her key concerns while establishing NHI was the underfunding of the NHI pilot sites by Treasury and the ‘enormous pressure to protect the positions of the high income groups and private sector profits’.
‘R11-million per pilot district. You can’t do anything with that to rebuild health services, it must be funded properly,’ she said.
Matsoso said success stories of universal health coverage in countries such as Brazil, Rwanda and Thailand had two things in common ‘ the roll-out of teams of community health workers in communities and a focus on the social determinants of health (access to water, sanitation, housing, etc).
‘South Africa needs a social solidarity movement whereby the young subsidise the old, the healthy subsidise the sick and the rich subsidise the poor,’ she said, adding that the plan remained to phase in NHI over the next 14 years.
Speaking in the same plenary, Dr David McCoy said one of the greatest health systems in the world, the UK’s National Health System (NHS) was ‘sadly no longer’.
The NHS was fundamentally a public health system that provided universal and equitable healthcare to the entire population.
McCoy said legislation instituted months ago in essence abolished NHS, resorting to ‘reckless vandalism driven by a neo-liberal agenda’.
McCoy, an academic who specialises in public health and works part-time in the NHS, said the UK was facing a growth in private insurance (as in the United States), a massive expansion of private providers and an increase in the commissioning private companies. He cited the example of the Virgin group was had been contracted to supply services linked to sexual health.
‘This is a devastating setback for the UK,’ he said, warning that big companies were realising that there are profits to be made from health.
The People’s Health Assembly (PHA), which started last Friday, has seen close to a thousand social activists, health workers, researchers and government officials from 90 countries meet.
Organised by the People’s Health Movement, the PHA is addressing issues that impact fundamentally on the health and wellbeing of the world’s poor and will culminate on Wednesday in a Cape Town Call to Action.
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