The National Health Insurance (NHI) plan is not a lifeline for South Africa’s broken health care system. It is a carefully engineered ploy to centralise control of more than R1-trillion, ostensibly for universal health care, writes Gugu Lourie in the Sunday Times.
South Africans are expected to trust the process led by a government incapable of managing a post office, let alone an entire nation’s compulsory health insurance. This is not progress; this is state capture 2.0, and it will dwarf the Eskom disaster in both scale and devastation.
The ANC, the largest party in the government of national unity, insists NHI will bring world-class health care to all. However, the necessary foundations to sustain such a system do not exist. There are several anomalies, such as the absence of a national electronic health database, non-existent integrated patient records and inadequate digital infrastructure.
Simply put, there is nothing to support NHI but empty promises and a seemingly cynical intent to obliterate medical aid societies. How exactly does the ANC plan to roll out universal health care when it cannot even ensure that state hospitals are run properly?
The answer is simple: it doesn’t have a plan, it has unbridled ambitions. This is not about health care. This is about control and extraction. Ironically, the other major part of government — the DA — opposes NHI to the point of litigation against it.
Read full opinion piece in the Sunday Times here
