IRR welcomes health sector opposition to President’s Health Compact

20 August 2024

The President’s Health Compact must be rejected and opposed by business and civil society alike insofar as it endorses the National Health Insurance Act, says the Institute of Race Relations (IRR).

Between the Presidential Health Summit Compact of 2018 and the passage of the National Health Insurance Act in May this year, the government had sufficient time to pay heed to the submissions to parliament that brought the unconstitutionality of the Act to the fore.

Yet the government failed to do so.

Says IRR Campaign Manager Makone Maja: “The IRR’s parliamentary submissions extensively warned against the likely devastation that the NHI would visit on the quality of health care in South Africa, and of the Act’s trampling the Bill of Rights.

“The right of access to health care services which the Constitution obliges the government to ‘take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources’ to progressively realise must be fiercely defended and protected from the Presidential Health Compact which threatens to undermine it through its endorsement of the NHI Act.

“The implementation of the NHI Act puts in jeopardy the health care that many South Africans currently enjoy, not only as it will cause the number of health insurance providers to shrink, but also because of the likelihood of a mass exodus of health care professionals, both of which stand to limit access to health care,” Maja says.

On the face of it, the Act contradicts the Health Summit Compact’s own aims of achieving universal health coverage.

The government was provided with alternatives and received suggestions to make improvements to the provisions of the NHI Act by business and civil society organisations, most, if not all, of which were ignored. No negotiations or consultations were undertaken to alleviate the concerns of stakeholders. Instead, the Act was forced through.

Concludes Maja: “The resistance to the President’s Health Compact could have been avoided if attention had been given to the problems riddling the Act. This also speaks to the management of parliamentary processes as a mandatory exercise, rather than as a substantive opportunity for genuine collaboration between the state and all other vested parties.”

The IRR urges the government to revoke the NHI Act, enable and support private low-cost benefit insurance options, and urgently repair the public health sector by combating corruption and maladministration as the best way to get South Africa on the path of broad, inclusive and competitive health care.

Issued by Makone Maja, IRR Campaign Manager, 20 August 2024