LETTER: NHI threat to SA’s world-class medical system

Kabelo Khumalo’s article, SA’s private healthcare system luring expats back, says Discovery CEO (November 8), doesn’t do the healthcare system justice. Even Adrian Gore’s comment at PSG’s Think Big seminar that “the standard of our private healthcare system is remarkable” is understated. It’s simply the best in the world.

American friends spend time in Cape Town each year for medical procedures. Canadians likewise. Having had one myself recently, my mother, a retired GP in the UK, was amazed. “The process would have taken at least six months, with luck, in the UK,” she said, “and for you it was two weeks? That’s unheard of, especially now that the British NHS is collapsing.”

SA private medical care is a jewel. So our National Assembly has passed the National Health Insurance (NHI) Bill, which now only needs the rubber stamps of the National Council of Provinces and the president before becoming law.

As medical aids will not be allowed to provide cover for medical care already covered by the NHI, the passage of this bill signals the beginning of the end for the private healthcare system.

Instead of marketing it overseas, by promoting medical vacations, which would ultimately increase tax revenues and employment, uplift the disintegrating state medical system, our government, enslaved by a failed ideology, only identifies successful economic sectors to destroy them.

James Cunningham
Camps Bay

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