LETTER: Funding NHI by pouring more money into broken system will drain economy
Analysis shows just running the existing system properly would improve the quality of state healthcare by at least 10 times
National Health Insurance (NHI) aims to improve the quality of healthcare provided by the state, yet the sole real change it proposes is to radically increase the amount of money available to be controlled by the minister of health (even going as far as to allow the proposed fund to borrow money!). The question is whether a lack of money is the main problem in the public health system.
There are many indirect ways to measure the quality of a healthcare service but the most direct way is the amount of medical liability the system generates because of malpractice in a year. The Section 27 law centre has published the new medical liabilities incurred for six of the nine provinces for 2018. In each of these provinces the healthcare spend per person was similar, ranging from R2.32 to R3.62 per person...
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