The Democratic Alliance (DA) in Mpumalanga challenges provincial MEC for Health, Sasekani Manzini, to stop forcing the issue of the National Health Insurance (NHI) and listen to the South African Medical Association (SAMA) who have confirmed that the South African Health System is not ready for NHI.
Recently SAMA informed the ministry of health that the country is not ready for NHI, but MEC Manzini is going around handing out NHI compliance certificates to public clinics despite challenges of staff shortage.
MEC Manzini handed out compliance certificates to 34 clinics, although she stated that only 123 of 292 health facilities in the province had met the minimum standard of the Office of Health Standards Compliance. This is also in stark contrast to MEC Manzini’s own utterances that all public Healthcare facilities are NHI compliant, while not a single public hospital in the province is NHI compliant. If they are all compliant as she claimed, then why were only 34 clinics given compliant certificates, and not all of them?
MEC Manzini continues to use semantics to ensure that she and/or the department of health looks better on paper than in the actual healthcare facilities.
The ANC-Led government has no plan to rescue the health system in Mpumalanga and therefore, to the detriment of all residents in the province, forces the National health Insurance.