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ActionSA is disappointed that President Ramaphosa has ignored the plea to avoid signing the NHI bill into law, in order to avoid state capture 2.0.

A couple of weeks ago, AcrionSA wrote to President Cyril Ramaphosa advising him to not sign the National Health Insurance (NHI) Bill, approved by Parliament into law in order for South Africa to avoid a second phase of state capture from occurring.

While the NHI is well-intentioned to address healthcare inequality in South Africa, however, in its current form, it is opening the health system to corruption as we have seen during the Covid-19 pandemic when billions were lost through PPE and related corruption.

The proposal is ill-conceived and will not address the shortcomings of the healthcare system in South Africa but present itself as a third tier in addition to the public and private healthcare. This will open up a loophole to budgetary irregularities that will enable corruption and collapse the healthcare system even further.

The state has consistently proven unable to manage money or complex systems, as we have seen at Eskom, Transnet and SASSA, and the creation of another healthcare behemoth will therefore do little to address healthcare but instead open up the industry to state capture and abuse.  It must be noted that the greatest problem in the South African healthcare system is not funding but the money lost through corruption and mismanagement.

In line with our adopted healthcare policy, ActionSA believes that the state should rather focus its attention on improving the current performance of our healthcare institutions. 

Once elected to government, we will reform the Health Department by prioritizing frontline healthcare by training additional doctors and nurses, reducing the administrative budget to 10%, and eliminating corruption in public hospitals.

To improve access to affordable comprehensive medical insurance, we will review the private healthcare insurance industry, expand minimum prescribed benefits for private healthcare users and implement regulations to prevent over-charging. ActionSA will also require Ministers and Parliamentarians to only use public healthcare so that they understand the impact of poor-quality public healthcare.

ActionSA is a party committed to providing safe and accessible healthcare to all South Africans and will work tirelessly to achieve that goal. For too long South Africans have been let down by the ruling party which has allowed for the decay in our public healthcare systems, and ActionSA is committed to turning the decay around.

Issued by ActionSA Team Fix South Africa Member Dr. Kgosi Letlape