Michael Settas News Today

Michael Settas, the Free Market Foundation's Health Policy Unit chairman, sheds light on SA's NHI project, raising widely held concerns.

The NHI policy is drenched in populist promises, Minister Phaahla asserts that it will deliver comprehensive healthcare to every citizen.

Michael Settas provides key points of failure in the policy processes that have characterised the development of the NHI proposal in SA.

The SA government cannot be expected to successfully manage the public and private healthcare sectors under the proposed NHI.

South Africa's public health system gives a taste of how the entire country’s centralised healthcare system will function under NHI.

Michael Settas demonstrates the disparity between the increased funding for the public health sector and its simultaneous disintegration.

1 August 2022 - This is the first in a series of five articles in which Michael Settas will provide readers with the critically important distinction between universal health coverage (a policy objective) and the proposed National Health Insurance (a financing mechanism).

Michael Settas outlines factors that “point to the NHI being a political motivation rather than having any intent to resolve valid failings."

It is entrenched as a fundamental human right in the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. There has recently been a subtle and little-noticed shift in the discourse around universal health care towards framing it as Universal Health Coverage, including in the language of documents...

Framing the fundamental human right to healthcare as insurance cover opens it up to exploitation. Dr Louis Reynolds from the People’s Health Movement of South Africa explains.