MPs have voted to rescind their decision to outsource processing the tens of thousands of written submissions received in response to the National Health Insurance (NHI) Bill, says a BusinessLIVE report. The Bill is the first piece of enabling legislation for the government’s plan for free universal health coverage.
The committee voted last month to appoint an external service provider to process the 32,217 hand-delivered and 32,634 e-mailed submissions received by Parliament, agreeing at the time that Parliament did not have the capacity for the job. But only one response to Parliament’s advertisement for a request for quotations was received, and Parliament’s procurement office indicated that rival bids would have had to be received to appoint a service provider.
ANC MPs then voiced their concern about the cost of appointing an external service provider, arguing that Parliament’s project management office should do the job instead, and voted to rescind their decision.
Parliament had previously dealt with complex projects, such as the high-level panel assessment of key legislation, chaired by former President Kgalema Motlanthe, ANC MP Annah Gela said.
Opposition MPs from the DA and FF Plus were outvoted. They said such a decision should only be considered once they had the facts about Parliament’s internal capacity to do the job, and raised concern about the potential for legal challenge if they were not first briefed by Parliament’s project management office on how it could assist in processing the written submissions.
[link url="https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/national/health/2020-11-04-anc-mps-vote-to-process-nhi-bill-submissions-internally/"]Full BusinessLIVE report[/link]