BL Premium reports that SA is forging ahead with its biggest post-apartheid healthcare reforms despite the lack of evidence from its multibillion-rand pilot programme that the scheme will work.  

National Health Insurance (NHI) is the government’s plan for achieving universal health coverage and envisages the establishment of a central fund that will purchase health services on behalf of all patients from public and private sector service providers.  The NHI pilot site evaluation report, commissioned by the Department of Health (DOH) from Genesis Analytics, is likely to give rise to criticism from some quarters including the DA, which has said the NHI was being laid on a shaky foundation, and the Free Market Foundation think-tank, which has argued that the plan would push up taxes and harm the economy.  The government allocated R4.9bn between 2012/2013 and 2016/2017 to 10 NHI pilot sites.  But the report indicates that the project was set up with no clear monitoring and evaluation framework, making it virtually impossible to gauge its effect and determine whether the government got a return on its investment.  It also found that the project had insufficient mechanisms in place to enable the government to monitor progress and correct things as they went wrong, and that it failed to collect vital data.  The DOH’s deputy director-general for the NHI, Anban Pillay, said the qualitative feedback provided by the evaluation offered useful insight from the people on the ground.

• Read the full original of Tamar Kahn’s report in the above regard at BusinessLive (paywall access only)

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