The National Health Insurance (NHI) Bill has been published in the government gazette, paving the way for the health department to set up an NHI fund that will purchase healthcare services on behalf of the population.
It is the first piece of enabling legislation for realising the government’s ambitions for introducing universal healthcare.
NHI is at heart a set of health financing reforms that the government hopes will change SA’s deeply inequitable access to healthcare, with wealthier people paying for generally high-quality private healthcare services while less well-off people depend on a patchy public healthcare service. …..more