First round of NHI Bill public hearings imminent

The National Assembly’s Health Committee has called for written submissions by 11 October on the 2019 National Health Insurance (NHI) Bill, CompliNEWS contributor Pam Saxby reports. This is in anticipation of a first round of parliamentary hearings, when stakeholders will also have an opportunity to make oral representations. As has been widely reported, the Bill seeks to establish an NHI fund for the ‘strategic purchasing of health care services’ on behalf of users; create mechanisms for the ‘equitable, effective and efficient’ utilisation of the fund’s resources in meeting the ‘health needs’ of SA’s citizenry; and to ‘preclude or limit undesirable, unethical and unlawful practices’ in relation to the fund and its users. To that end, it focuses on the necessary structures, their roles and functions and related governance and administrative issues.

As the first step towards providing ‘access to needed health care that is of sufficient quality to be effective’, as well as ‘financial protection’ from its costs, the Bill was described last week by Health Minister Zweli Mkhize as a ‘vision’ and an opportunity to ‘up the game’. Briefing committee members, the Minister nevertheless conceded that government ‘will need to invest strongly’ in improving the standard of public healthcare services and facilities, which are at ‘such a low level of quality’ that his department ‘will have to fight hard’ to improve them. While the Bill proposes a range of possible revenue sources for the fund, these will be fleshed out in a separate money Bill apparently still very much a work in progress. The role of medical schemes under NHI will be the focus of regulations, presumably under the 1998 Medical Schemes Act, daft amendments to which were released last year for comment.