Africa-Press – South-Africa. The Board of Healthcare Funders (BHF), which represents private medical aid schemes, appears confident that it will be able to prove that the National Health Insurance Act is unconstitutional.
Although it does not expect the president to comply with last week’s high court ruling to provide the record of his decision to sign the bill into law, it said that this judgment was a critical first step in bolstering its next legal steps against the act.
At the closing session of its annual conference in Cape Town on Wednesday, the BHF’s legal team announced its plans to add two more NHI cases to the growing list, based on constitutionality and public participation.
The BHF is one of at least three healthcare bodies that have launched legal cases against the National Health Insurance Act.
BHF lawyer, Neil Kirby, said by denying citizens the choice of how and where they sourced medical services would not meet constitutional muster.
“There’s no way the current structuring of the NHI Act, both in terms of what it proposes in relation to the functioning of the fund, the fund itself, and the role the private sector plays within that context, will ever match what is required in terms of the Constitution.”
The preparatory work for introducing the bill was more than a decade in the making, before spending five years in the parliamentary pipeline.
But the SA Private Practitioners’ Forum lawyer, Glenn Penfold, said the act remained vague on too many aspects of health services and delivery.
“We effectively have an act of Parliament, that I think not even the drafters know what that act will actually look like in practice.”
The SA Medical Association, meanwhile, has cited reduced access to primary healthcare and the stripping away of provincial healthcare powers among its concerns.
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