Private healthcare funders should dump the various legal challenges against the National Health Insurance (NHI) – which were likely to drag on for another 10 years at least – and rather engage in dialogue to address their concerns.
Professor Sharon Fonn, who was one of the five members of the panel which conducted the market inquiry into the private health sector, warned delegates at the annual Board of Healthcare Funders conference this week that an exclusive focus on NHI was misplaced, reports EWN.
“The fact that the National Department of Health either does not have the capacity or the will to focus on anything else is a big problem,” she said.
“I think we lack the kind of leadership we need to move this forward. And that’s my point. Let’s get out of the courts, let’s get around a table. This is a policy process.”
Neil Kirby, director at Werksmans Attorneys and BHF’s lead attorney on the matter, said the legal challenges to the NHI Act are so varied it could take another 10 to 15 years to finalise – but the cases were worth pursuing because of the impact the NHI could have on the quality of healthcare.
“The issue is not the principle of universal access to healthcare, but the standard at which that healthcare will be provided,” he said.
“We have to get this right from a legal point of view, otherwise it’s a slippery slope from an application of a Constitution like ours.”
Wits economist Professor Alex van den Heever said the private medical scheme industry has been left to its own devices as “the government (focused mainly on the NHI) failed to attend to key aspects that could have made the industry’s future more sustainable”.
Increasingly unaffordable healthcare, along with extended uncertainty about the NHI, were highlighted as serious concerns by the BHF at its annual conference, reports Netwerk24.
Flagging rising healthcare costs, Metropolitan Health Group CEO Ali Hamdulay told delegates that over the past few years, medical inflation had risen from two percentage points above CPI to the current approximately four percentage points, while Dr Paula Armstrong, of FTI Consulting, said the healthcare reforms of the 1990s had led to increased consumer protection contained in the Medical Schemes Act, but several aspects of the reform had simply never been implemented.
These included compulsory membership and a risk equalisation fund to facilitate cross-subsidisation of high-cost members.
Instead, she pointed out, the government had concentrated all of its efforts on the NHI project.
She added that the escalating cost of private health insurance was making it increasingly more unaffordable for the working class, forcing them to turn to public healthcare.
Netwerk24 article (Restricted access)
EWN article – BHF hears litigation against NHI could drag on for at least 10 years (Open access)
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Medical schemes and union kickstart NHI legal challenges
NHI public consultation under scrutiny in top court