Statement on the passing of the National Health Insurance Bill – towards quality healthcare for all:

13 June 2023

The passing of the National Health Insurance (NHI) Bill must mark the development of a decisive epoch, an epoch of an irreversible rupture with the present unequal two-tiered healthcare regime.

The irrational two-tiered healthcare regime has persisted hand-in-hand with income and wealth inequalities, which have worsened with every crisis of the exploitative capitalist system.

The NHI legislation must focus on a major redistribution of health-care resources to benefit all, as opposed to a tiny minority.

Such redistribution requires a system-wide structural transformation approach.

South Africa cannot transform and upgrade its public healthcare sector without eliminating the imbalances between the private and public health sectors which are skewed in favour of the minority-servicing private health sector.

This is not the time to tinker with the unjust two-tiered healthcare regime.

The NHI legislation has to lay a solid foundation for thoroughgoing structural transformation of healthcare provision in favour of the people as a whole.

Access to quality healthcare must not be determined by whether one has or does not have money to pay.

The supreme right to life is important for every person and not only for those who have the money to buy access to healthcare commoditised.

NHI legislation must above all guarantee quality and comprehensive healthcare for everyone, for life.

Advancing to a NHI, especially through the core principles, enjoys popular support. The principles are, namely:

1.   Universal healthcare coverage and social solidarity, in which not only is everyone is and has access to healthcare on same terms, and in which healthcare resources are redistributed in favour of the majority, the working-class and poor, those with the greatest healthcare needs.

2.   Comprehensive health services, from promotion, prevention and treatment.

3.   Publicly funded and publicly administered NHI Fund, which acts a single funder for the provision of healthcare services accepted by all sectors.

4.   Free access to healthcare at the point of service, in which the provision of healthcare services is based on need and predominantly funded through tax contributions and therefore not dependent on an individual’s ability to pay.

The SACP is vehemently opposed to corporate capture of and profit-making from the NHI, and its exploitation in any form. We are against corruption and the neoliberal policy of austerity, which has also contributed to delaying the advance to the NHI. While some provisions in the NHI Bill can help deal with some of these problems, the SACP is calling on the working-class and progressive sections of our society to build capacity to tackle any of these problems should any rear its ugly head in this process of transformation.

Forces opposed to quality healthcare for all have intransigently opposed the effort to establish the NHI in our country. These include, among others, oligopolies in private healthcare provision and the administration of associated schemes. They cannot continue to succeed in blocking or delaying the establishment of the much-needed provision of quality healthcare for all through the NHI!

The NHI Bill before the National Assembly comes a long way. It is a milestone in what should be a continuing struggle for quality healthcare for all, against the background of the overall agenda by the reactionary opposition to NHI.

Issued by Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo, SACP Central Committee Member, National Spokesperson, 13 June 2023