Blade's out for those opposed to national health scheme

In his State of the Nation address Jacob Zuma informed us that the government would introduce the National Health Insurance (NHI) in a phased and incremental manner. He went on to inform the nation that “in order to initiate the NHI, the urgent rehabilitation of public hospitals will be undertaken through public-private partnerships”. I understood public-private partnerships to mean more tender irregularities and patronage among the “loyal and disciplined cadres” of the movement.

This is a wonderful thing that Zuma is proposing and which his government is intending to implement. We all want access to healthcare because this is our constitutional right. Perhaps the government can start by installing showers in all our homes in the interest of promoting healthy living and hygiene. But the one problem with the Constitution is that it does not guarantee us “quality healthcare” and it’s apparent that the ANC government has not prioritised this over the years.

Providing universal access to healthcare means access to public and private hospitals by all regardless of how shallow or deep our pockets are. Private hospitals don’t provide the best health services but I would rather find myself on an operating table at Netcare’s Sunninghill or Morningside hospital than at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital where I would most likely have to share the medical equipment with the patient next to me. I would not want any doctor using his Okapi on me because the hospital has no scalpels.

So the idea of rehabilitating public hospitals sounds great until you realise the ANC government has been talking about rehabilitation of hospitals since 1999 and now they are in such a state that visiting a neighbour who is a fly-by-night “inyanga” sounds like a good proposition. Zuma’s praisesingers would be quick to say “ah … but we know Mbeki’s government was incompetent”. Get a life! Zuma was part of the government for the better of the last 15 years and that would make him equally incompetent, never mind questionable.

Zuma’s cheerleaders have sold him to us as a “man of the people” and the push to implement NHI is a desperate attempt to further entrench this fallacious image and mislead the public into believing it is his government’s initiative. Universal healthcare was first mooted in the early 1990s. It is nothing new. The previous Mbeki government had chosen not to implement NHI purely because it was not feasible. National Treasury back in 1997 was concerned that this grandiose scheme would impose an increased burden on already overburdened taxpayers.

I am left wondering what has since changed that the government now wants to impose a mandatory scheme that would require employees and employers to fund it to the benefit of everyone else including the poor. The Minister of Health Aaron Motsoaledi even said without shame that “those who earn better will pay more”.

I doubt there is anyone out there who wants to deny the poor access to healthcare but it becomes problematic when the government seeks to penalise others to make up for its failures. We have poor people because the government has failed to provide accessible quality education and create jobs. I suppose the basic income grant, at top of Cosatu and the SACP’s objectives, will follow soon. Implementing NHI is not the answer to the national health crisis. The poor need a better education to help them distinguish the workable remedies from the bulls**t. Sleeping with an infant will not cure HIV!

With all things being equal the NHI is a fabulous idea, more so because the medical-aid schemes are fleecing us, the relatively healthy, and excluding people who most need their services. Members of these schemes pay exorbitant costs yet in life or death situations they flatly refuse to pay for much needed drugs. Regulatory controls in terms of the Medical Schemes Act of 1998 appear to be failing. I digress.

The government seems to think the money will fall from the sky. The NHI is going to result in heavy financial strain on the fiscus. The government already does not have enough funds to finance basic services because these funds were diverted to fund a bloated government and because of the decline in tax revenue due to the economic crisis. I am not even going to touch on the expensive luxury cars that ministers are splashing on. It is pampering time for the “Lords of the Bling Bling”.

Now we have the pseudo-commandant-in-chief Blade Nzimande threatening to fight us if we oppose the NHI. Speaking in Virginia in the Free State recently he said: “The capitalist classes have already started a huge campaign in the media to try to discredit this system and we want to say to them as communists today, war unto you … prepare for a huge battle because we are going to mobilise the workers and the poor of the country to fight against you so we can have a national health insurance scheme.”

Do we not have laws that prohibit incitement to violence? We cannot allow him to threaten to hold us to ransom when we exercise our constitutional rights. Bheki Cele must arrest this man!

Zuma’s government is simply being over-ambitious, even Barack Obama’s rich government (maybe not any more) is struggling to convince the US Senate to approve its proposed universal healthcare reform. What is a broke government going to do better?