What Next For The NHI?

There has been enough debate and deliberation around South Africa’s proposed National Health Insurance Bill for unified health coverage. Covid-19 has turned the spotlight on it again, and there’s more news expected in February 2021.

- Chanel Retief

I feel good,” were the last words 33-year-old Charlie Mpogeng remembers his brother, Herman Motlhabane, saying to him before his untimely passing on the morning of July 17.

Motlhabane died, his relatives not knowing it was because of Covid-19 as his test results were only made available two weeks after his passing.

He had complained of a flu before being hospitalized.

“It was during that time of mass hysteria when everyone was like ‘if you have the flu, have it checked out’,” Mpogeng remembers as he walks to his brother’s grave at Westpark Cemetery in Emmarentia, west of Johannesburg. Even as he speaks, a tractor is digging up more graves around him, for other hapless victims who have succumbed to Covid-19.

By the end of July, 1,932 people had died of the pandemic in South Africa’s Gauteng Province, Motlhabane one of them.

With a disruptive virus still on the prowl to claim more unsuspecting lives, political establishments everywhere are sitting up and revisiting their healthcare systems – or the lack of it.

In South Africa, the focus has returned to the National Health Insurance (NHI) Bill, proposed to improve and strengthen the health financing system and provide quality, affordable medical care to all.

“The pandemic also showed the need for the public and private healthcare sectors to work together,” Dr Zweli Mkhize, the country’s health minister, said at a press briefing in October. “This is one of the core principles of the NHI.”