In a recent article in Daily Maverick, “Health budget slashed despite vaccine commitments” (26 February 2021), authors Daniel McLaren, Mbali Baduza, Sasha Stevenson and Julia Chaskalson from Section 27 rightly lament the slashing of the latest public health budgets, forced upon Treasury under the weight of the precarious prospects the country now faces. Their concerns about inadequacies in providing access to quality healthcare for the poorest and most vulnerable in our society is without any doubt laudable and they deserve commendation for their continued efforts. As a cure for these funding problems, they fervently call for the advancement of the National Health Insurance (NHI). The problem, however, with supporting the government’s NHI policy is that it remains, as it has from when the green paper was published in 2011, a red herring.