SACP Stands Firm Behind the NHI Against Greedy Capitalists, Urges the Government to Press Ahead Unwaveringly

Saturday, 24 August 2024: - In defence of the national transformation and development imperative to transition to quality healthcare for all through the National Health Insurance (NHI), the South African Communist Party (SACP) will strengthen its efforts in pursuit of maximum working-class unity and mobilisation against the greedy capitalists who seek to reverse emerging advances towards securing greater progress in healthcare provision. 

Today, the SACP urges the government to proceed decisively with the implementation of the NHI, which is now enshrined in our law. The NHI aims to ensure universal healthcare coverage and eliminate disparities and inequality in access to healthcare based on class, income, race, gender, geographic location and other forms of unfair discrimination. We cannot overemphasise the importance of access to quality healthcare for all citizens, regardless of social, economic, or historical status, as a fundamental right guaranteed by our hard-won constitution.

This serves as a warning against the capitalists who are driven by profits and to this end capture of healthcare and its conversion into a commodity, which they make available only to those who can afford to buy it and thus excluding the vast majority of the workers and poor. This exclusion prevails in the financialised, monopoly-dominated private healthcare sector as the order of the day.

The exploitative, anti-transformation agenda in healthcare provision is supported by right-wing commercial media. In particular, the segment of the media with roots in active support for and complicity in apartheid labelled the Presidential Health Compact as “controversial”. While Acting President Paul Mashatile signed the compact on Thursday, 22 August 2024, the heartless capitalists – especially the monopolies controlling the combined dominant market share in the private healthcare sector, sections of finance capital, other financial services corporations, and their associates, agents, and lackeys – boycotted the Presidential Health Compact. This boycott is a negative reaction to the compact’s commitment to the NHI.

Similarly, last month, following the North Gauteng High Court’s ruling that declared Sections 36–40 of the National Health Act 61 of 2003 invalid, the biased right-wing media in its propaganda blitz misleadingly reported the ruling as a blow to the NHI, as if the judgment referred to the NHI Bill signed into law by President Cyril Ramaphosa in May 2024. Although the judgment is not against the NHI, the Department of Health has a duty to pursue an appeal to give practical effect to and actively address the core of its response: “Health Ministry responds to court judgement on the invalidity of sections of the National Health Act.”

Issued by the South African Communist Party,

Founded in 1921 as the Communist Party of South Africa.

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Dr Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo, Central Committee Member

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