News24 reports that the Democratic Alliance (DA) said on Monday as it delivered about 87,000 petitions about the National Health Insurance (NHI) Bill to parliament that people were being misled about what the bill was really about.  

DA spokesperson on health, Siviwe Gwarube, and a number of the party’s MPs addressed the media on the steps outside the National Assembly, with some boxes behind them representing the petitions.  The DA, which supports universal health care but which is opposed to the NHI, has its own submission on the bill.  Over the past few weeks, the portfolio committee on health has visited Mpumalanga, the Northern Cape, Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal for a public participation process.  "What has been clear is what we suspected all along.  South Africans are not properly informed about the contents of this bill," claimed Wilson.  She added people have raised the quality of health care as their main concern, but they have been led to believe that the bill would fix what was broken with the healthcare system.  "It will not.  They've been seriously misled about what this bill entails," said Wilson.  The DA has also lodged a complaint with Parliament's chair of chairs, Cedrick Frolick, about misleading leaflets distributed at the hearings.  The deadline for submissions on the bill is 29 November.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Jan Gerber at News24

Read too, DA collects 87,000 public submissions on NHI Bill, at BusinessLive

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