NHI

TAC supports the establishment of a universal health coverage system in South Africa. The aim to make healthcare funding more equal and accessible to all, underpins the values of life, dignity, social solidarity, and risk-sharing that TAC fully believes in and supports. TAC considers a progressive and effectively structured and implemented national Health Insurance (NHI) system to be essential to the achievement of universal health coverage in South Africa in the medium to long term. We maintain that the NHI does not achieve this objective in its current form.

The NHI will not in itself solve the dysfunction plaguing our public healthcare system in many provinces. It is hard to see how NHI could work if uncommitted people continue to be appointed to influential positions in our public healthcare system — and the failure to put in place adequate checks and balances for the exercise of power also inevitably risks corruption. NHI must go hand-in-hand with a new era of professionalism and an end to cadre-deployment.