Quicknews

By Marcus Low for Spotlight

One of the most damaging aspects of our public discourse on National Health Insurance (NHI) is the mistaken notion that the only two options are NHI and the status quo. Often implicitly, sometimes explicitly, defenders of NHI suggest that any argument against NHI is one for maintaining the current system. Since the current system doesn’t work very well for most people, this line of argument gets some purchase, even though it is based on a false premise.

In his book “Which country has the world’s best health care?”, oncologist and bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel outlines the key features of healthcare systems in 11 different countries. Two things that stand out are that health systems differ substantially between countries and that most systems are the relatively messy products of complex histories and political and other compromises. This latter point about the path-dependency of healthcare systems is an important point we will return to.

Many varieties

South Africa’s proposed NHI system is sometimes clumped together with systems in other countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and Thailand. At times this is fair, at times it skims over important differences.

For example, NHI will be a single-payer system, which is to say, the NHI fund will be responsible for almost all purchasing of healthcare services in the country. In some respects, Canada has a similar system, except that rather than one system for the whole country, they in effect have 13 single-payer systems for each of their provinces and territories. Even Thailand, at times referred to as an example of NHI, technically has three funds rather than one, although it resembles South Africa’s NHI plans in several other respects. In principle, a large single-payer should be able to negotiate better deals than several smaller payers, but on the other hand, having Canada-style provincial funds would be more closely aligned with South Africa’s current governance arrangements and in some provinces, like the Western Cape, chances are people would have more trust in a fund run by the province than in one run nationally.

Another thing that quickly becomes apparent when looking at the variety of healthcare systems out there, is that a simplistic dichotomy between NHI and private healthcare is a false one. Countries like the Netherlands and Germany have achieved excellent health outcomes with systems that are neither NHI-style systems nor examples of the private sector running riot. Though the details are significantly more complicated than this, you can think of the Netherlands and Germany roughly as having many strictly regulated medical schemes (called sickness funds in Germany) with scheme/fund membership being compulsory (with some exceptions). The German system is progressive in that people with higher incomes contribute more than people with lower incomes – an important difference from South Africa’s medical schemes.

Funds in the Netherlands are also not primarily funded directly, as with our medical schemes, but receive funding from a central fund via a risk adjustment process. Both the German and Dutch systems have significant social solidarity built-in in the way it institutionalises the cross-subsidising of the poor by the wealthy.

In South Africa, such a system could, for example, be implemented by dramatically tightening up the regulation of medical schemes, putting in place a progressive mechanism for cross-subsidisation between schemes, making scheme membership compulsory for those who can afford it, and, over time, using tax revenue to pay for scheme membership for the unemployed (although this last element, like NHI, does come with a big question mark on affordability. Those with long enough memories might remember that a system roughly along such lines was on the cards in South Africa around the turn of the century. (see for example the Taylor report of 2002 and this interesting paper.)

Getting to there from here

One striking thing about NHI in South Africa is that for all the column inches, submissions to Parliament, and oral hearings across the country and in Parliament, hardly anyone seems to have shifted their positions in the last decade and there has been very little serious consideration of alternative paths to universal healthcare.

One reason for this is the sense that the design choices behind the NHI Bill were essentially decided on by a relatively small group of people in the National Health Department and the African National Congress (ANC) around 10 or 15 or so years ago. What followed since then often felt like an attempt at co-opting rather than meaningful engagement. This was particularly apparent in the way some members of the Portfolio Committee on Health continuously pushed people on whether they are for or against NHI, rather than engaging with the substance of people’s submissions. Though the boxes for public engagement were ticked, the reality was often a parody of what such engagement is meant to be.

We could have gone a different route. It would have been entirely feasible to have a process for NHI akin to the much more meaningful set of engagements we had for the Competition Commission’s Health Market Inquiry into the private healthcare sector. In that case, people could make submissions, be heard by the panel, and crucially, one never got the sense that the outcome was preordained. Such a process may in some respects have given government officials and members of Parliament a few more headaches, but it would also have built trust and understanding of the technical issues, and for major reforms like NHI trust and public understanding is half the battle.

Republished from Spotlight under a Creative Commons Licence.

Source: Spotlight