COSATU Central Executive Committee calls on President Jacob Zuma to intervene and stop the attacks on NHI especially from inside government
25 May 2016
The Congress of South African Trade Union’s Central Executive Committee is deeply concerned that National Health Insurance is departing from the framework that was developed by the Alliance ,through the ANC Education and Health Subcommittee, Alliance Summits, and the 2009 and 2014 manifestos.
The CEC is calling on the country’s, president, Cde Jacob Zuma to intervene and take the lead in the implementation NHI ,because this is one of those projects he must leave behind as his legacy for the working class.
There is an urgent need to arrest this deterioration and the deviation from the initial conceptual framework that the NHI was founded on. The NHI is under sustained threat inside the government, mainly from the Treasury and vested interests at provincial government level. There are also outside threats coming from the four private hospital monopolies, the Free Market Foundation and others, such as the foreign-funded NGOs.
The president cannot afford to sit on the sidelines and watch this ANC policy being watered down and handed over to big business interests by his own government departmets. The NHI is the only programme of the ANC government, since 1994 that proposes to radically redistribute resources on a mass scale to the poor, directly from the rich, ensuring access to all and also breaking down class differentiation in the quality of access.